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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents the project of participatory mapping of the Ajuá River in São Paulo. Based on the action-research methods, we aimed to map living conditions and socio-environmental issues with students from a local elementary school, undergraduate students, researchers and social movements.

Paper long abstract:

In the metropolitan Brazilian peripheries, there is a nexus between social and environmental issues. The district of Jaraguá, less than 20 kilometers northwest of São Paulo downtown, is an example. There, the topography works as a limiting factor for the expansion of the urban occupation and, because of this, a low-income population that has no access to formal housing and is forced to occupy its risk areas.

Therefore, with funding from the "Climate-U: Transforming universities for a changing climate" program, the Center for Institutional Evaluation of the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo (NAI-FEUSP) proposed a project focused on young students from a local public school and undergraduate students from USP in the areas of education and health. The proposal was to build a collective learning field based on the territory (SANTOS, 2000), bringing together the experience of the local community and the academic knowledge to investigate origins and ways to address these problems. To this end, the living conditions around the Ajuá river, nearby the school, was taken as the axis of this action-research.

The program consisted of six meetings, three tours - one of them to a settlement of a housing movement; conversation rounds with universitary researchers; attempts at virtual mapping; interviews with residents; and the production of cartographies about the place and their experiences.

This paper aims to share methodological learnings about the experience of a community-based mapping with youth, as well as its theoretical implications for socio-environmental studies in socio-ambiental vulnerable urban spaces.