Estudo de distintos níveis holárquicos para uma região metropolitana por meio da aplicação de Indicadores de sustentabilidade ambiental e de saúde

Environmental and health problems acquire character, magnitude and unpredictability in large cities, with little understanding of these processes and their driving forces and weak articulation within a metropolitan area and its components, the municipalities. This paper aims at establishing theoretical and methodological basis to approach a metropolitan system, the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region, by means of sustainability in terms of environment and health. The metropolis was studied as a self-organizing holarchic open system by an indicator matrix analysis showing how socioeconomic, environmental and health characteristics are distributed, conferring singular characteristics to the 39 component municipalities which are understood as holons. Exploring watershed protection areas, those are unequally distributed in peripherals municipalities in which are found worse conditions in terms of pressure for occupation and social and health indicators. The results obtained allows to infer that the sustainability must be analyzed from other centralities in a metropolitan region, like in the situation of providing environmental services as water, overcoming the burden of certain municipalities because of their population or income. This conception must be considered as relevant motivation for recovering the metropolitan management with focus on sustainability.