HIDDEN AND UNMAPPED: AN INVESTIGATION ON THE STREAMS OF MANDAQUI WATERSHED

Abstract

During its growth, the city of São Paulo buried considerable part of its rivers and streams. Although it has been invested a great deal of money in this operation and the modified water streams have got status of urban infrastructure, the systematic recording of their characteristics and locations has not been done. The result is that until very recently it was extremely difficult to know the location of these hidden streams, generating conflicts and situations potentially dangerous. During the recent years, public policies and laws triggered the production of a systematic and detailed hydrographical mapping of the city. Despite the excellence of the professionals involved in that survey, it is observed that such a mapping is incompletely represented. So, this article intends to collaborate with its refinement, presenting and discussing techniques used by researchers to identify hidden water streams. As a case study, it was selected the watershed basin of Mandaqui Stream, in the northern region of the city. It was detected that the methods used are different from those of the official mapping, but they do not antagonize each other. It was concluded that mentioned procedures are useful in studies that require better details of the urban hydrography, being suggested its use in official mapping, especially when the official drainage registration is not available.