New Ecologies of knowledge for the governance of water infrastructures in São Paulo

Today environmental crisis disputes pure technical management of water flows and faces us with the absence of a definitive solution for every problem. This situation can be clearly observed in cities built by moving water away from its hydrographic fabric, such as São Paulo in Brazil. Its first settlement was constructed in 1554 in the Atlantic forest -Mata Atlantica- and over the years the thick network of rivers crossing it was piped down below ground, the empty riverbeds and valleys used as roads, and the remaining outdoor rivers channelized to be control and exploited for the production of electricity. As a consequence, during the rainy season, water does not remain in the spaces decided by the public administration and technical projects: it takes back in particular in the eastern suburbs of the city historically relegated to receive the poor and the immigrants. Looking at examples in which water flows, hybridised (Swyngedouw 1996) by infrastructures (Gandy 2004) and political dynamics (Rolnik 2019) influence the production of space and its conflicts in São Paulo, the paper posits the need for a new model of knowledge production about water governance. In particular, it sustains that participatory art methodologies have the potential to produce and study new ecologies in which knowledge manifests as a product of the conflict and interaction, between the competing hopes and imaginaries that citizens, specialists, construction companies and politicians pour onto water bodies and infrastructures.