Visualizing water infrastructure: a guide to the Cantareira system in São Paulo
The term Cantareira became very apparent in São Paulo in 2014 and 2015. Low rainfall accelerated the depletion of the reservoirs of the Cantareira water production system, impacting 9 million people in the Metropolitan region of Sao Paulo. Despite São Paulo’s affluence, the fragility of its core infrastructure became visible as the “water crisis” (crise hídrica) unfolded throughout a two-year period until rainfall returned in May 2016.
Water had suddenly flooded a new space on the everyday discourse: when turning the morning radio one would be informed of the day's time, weather, and the amount of water storage left in the Cantareira reservoir. The drought in Brazil's largest city and economic center had captivated even international newspaper headlines, only months before the country was to host the International World Cup of 2014.
But, what does the Cantareira system look like? While repeating that term in everyday discourse, the materiality of the water system remained abstract, limiting a broader understanding of water security to 'storage depletion rates'. What are those invisible networks and what can we learn from their relationship with the streets at their surface?
This mapping projects proposes an alternative lense for guiding a walk over the city streets. It depicts the water infrastructure of the Cantareira by pulling the buried pipes, and adding images that illustrate the systems' physical features and functionality.
In what ways might we reverse the aesthetic and cultural convention that covers infrastructure networks? How can this layer be integrated to citizens' mental maps and play with their sense of orientation? In São Paulo where many neighborhoods lack distinguishing landmarks that imprint one's mind, might this collaborative tour invite you to reimagine and speculate on alternative futures of water provision? What are the actors involved in the water distribution in the city that are not mapped by the network? And finally, what can we unlearn from our own thoughtless routine interactions with water?
This project is part of my thesis research "Mapping responses to water security in São Paulo in the light of the drought 2014-15". The guided tour map in the "The Cantareira System" tab, represents the area serviced by the Cantareira, based on the information of the above image which depicts the entirety the water supply network of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region (SPMR), called (SIM - Sistema Integrado Metropolitano) . This map was obtained in an interview with a representative of the main water utility that manages the SIM and the Cantareira, called SABESP. The shapes that are immediately recognizable in this map to non-SABESP representatives are the São Paulo city boundaries and the urbanized footprint of the Metropolitan Region presented in different color shades, but it is overall hard to read.
The thesis research included fieldwork and site visits, which are used to illustrate the process of water production, treatment and distribution of the Cantareira. Within the SIM water integrated network I focused on the representation of the area serviced by the Cantareira, which is also the largest water provision system of the SIM. To contextualize the map for non-water-engineers I started by georeferrencing this image in QGIS. I vectorized the pipes, the colored areas of the urbanized and the sectoral reservoirs, and created a database which was finally adapted to a webmap. This format allows to simultaneously illustrate the parts of the water provision system in pictures and contextualizing those objects in a map. It is an attempt to translate in an interactive form an obscured language of water provision, which often excludes non-urban-engineers for understanding the provision of water and its interaction with the visible fact and socio-demographics that are visible at the surface of the built environment.