Visualizing water infrastructure: a guide to the Cantareira

São Paulo, Brazil

By Ana Lago
drought, infrastructure, water infrastructure

A walk-through the invisible networks of water provision service. It focuses specifically on the Cantareira system in the city of São Paulo.

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 a section of the image above. This image depicts the entire integrated network of water provision to the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (SIM - Sistema Integrado Metropolitano) , and was obtained in an interview with a representative of the main water utility 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.

The research also included fieldwork and site visits, which are used to illustrate the process of water production, treatment and distribution. Within the SIM I focused specifically on the Cantareira, the largest water provision system of the SIM network, and also the most severely hit by the drought of 2014-15. 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.