Áreas verdes e bem-estar em ambiente urbano de porte médio: usos e tipologias das áreas livres e as percepções de saúde na cidade de Dourados – MS

Abstract

Industrialization and rapid and precarious urbanization gathered conditions to promote increasingly unhealthy urban environments. At the end of the 19th century, to mitigate the absence of the first nature in the city, efforts started so that "the green", the second nature that refers to the first nature, could participate in the city landscape. Today, garden cities are still the exception, inaccessible to almost all workers, who enjoy the few areas free of buildings in public space. These free areas are used for leisure, practice of exercises, contemplation of nature, scenario of social relations, and necessary for the guarantee of quality of life. The research aimed at analyzing the relations between the indicators of use of open areas and the perceived health conditions of the residents of the city of Dourados. This city, a regional capital of medium population size, is located in the southern quadrant of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul and has, in 2021, only 28 open areas, with a predominance of precarious infrastructure, insufficient maintenance and unequal spatial distribution. The methodology consisted of a survey of primary data with the application of an electronic questionnaire developed in Google Forms, with sampling by the Snowball method, disseminated and answered through the world wide web, a strategy to develop the study during the CoVID-19 pandemic. The questionnaire sought to characterize the socio-demographic profile, the frequency of use, the motivations, and the distance from home to free areas with 32 questions, in addition to 26 from the WHOQOL-bref, developed by the WHO to measure the quality of life. We obtained 326 participants, after applying the exclusion criteria, we performed the measurements in an electronic spreadsheet with a sample of 319 properly filled out, a study with a 95% confidence level and 5.5% margin of error. The secondary data for developing the NDVI and land use maps, in ArcGIS 10.5, are from public sources: the satellite images from Google images and Landsat 8 (INPE); the cartographic bases from IBGE and Dourados City Hall; and the infrastructure characterization of the free areas from the results of Araújo (2019). The main results are: of the 28 free areas only two public urban green areas (AVUP) were identified, the Antenor Martins Park and the Rego D'água Environmental Park; and the proximity associated with the frequency of use of free areas by the population impacts on better perceived health condition, especially of adults. In the interrelation between frequency of use, distance and perceived well-being, participants who frequent open areas showed significantly higher percentages of satisfaction than those who do not. With the results obtained, it was possible to identify a significant difference between the age groups of adults and adolescents, where the adult age group proved to be more frequent in these areas and with more positive values of health and well-being. This shows that living closer to and/or frequenting squares, urban parks, and urban parks and urban parks, results in a better level of perception of well-being and health, especially for the adult age group.