Aerophotogametric Mapping evolution
in São Paulo (1930 - 65)

The discontinuous and variable urban structure of the East Zone turns all mapping problematic. How to map this mutant geometry of economic activities, indistinct use of the ground, informal economy always in dislocation and brusque populational changes? An urban pattern in constant alteration due to consecutive operations of transport systems (express railroads, ways, subway) implantation, in general disarticulated. Deep disarticulation in the urban and social fabric, followed of shifts and reconfigurations, generating a diffuse territory, unprovided of necessary delimitation between different forms and uses of the space. An endless and moving zone.

It is impossible to map this limitless space. The limits traced by the administrative regions or the transit routes do not serve to skirt these imperceptible streams, these relations of proximity and distance, which happen independently of all metric. They are not-locatable relations. Territories that set and dissolve themselves by gradual and local smoothing, differences that alter one same distance: dissolution of the scales that oriented the perception of the metropolis. The territory becomes the critical distance between the situations.

The question of the large dimensions could be placed this way: in which map to draw these unexpected propagations, these movements? The question is about the relation between the place and the global. How to pass from a scale to another? The intense scanning of singular localities and delicate proximities, particular places whose removal guarantees the global dimension of the mapping. By short or longer prolongations, a stream that constructs to the world place by place.

How to map a world without borders, measure, limits? Is an atlas that it is drawn by these interlacements, by continuous connections and inclusions. Expanding itself each time further. The distances are substituted by new proximities, redistributed following other connections. Proximities that by no means reflect the reality of the land, but allow new passages, other interactions.