University of São Paulo: Collaborative platform of architectural images seeks collective knowledge about the urban

Have you ever imagined a space on the internet that brings together images and files related to the area of ​​architecture and urbanism in the city of São Paulo, in any city in Brazil or in the world, and in which anyone can access knowledge or help to expand the image bank? from the insertion of material to compose the collection? This place exists, has been operating for over ten years and is called Arquigrafia.

Conceived in 2008 and close to completing 13 years of existence, the collaborative platform Arquigrafia is part of an interdisciplinary project at USP created by professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU) Artur Rozestraten. The project, which gave rise to the system in operation since 2011 and already has more than 13 thousand images for consultation, involves the construction of a collaborative environment of architectural images on the Web that encourages the sharing of information, experiences and images of buildings and of urban spaces.

With a very different thematic focus, for example, from the social network Instagram, with regard to its scope, Arquigrafia is distinguished by being an educational platform that goes beyond the simple registration and availability of images, as it prioritizes detailed information about the content. of photographic records on the platform, including location data, descriptive details regarding architecture, user reviews, suggestions, related images and other information. In addition to being a space that guarantees access to current records and essential historical documentation for future consultations.

According to the project coordinator, Professor Artur Rozestraten, Arquigrafia is important because it contributes to the continuous training of students, architects and urban planners, as well as the general public, based on the registration of their own place, neighbourhood, street and region they inhabit. “Arquigrafia provides an approach to a reality that is sensitive and that can be perceived when walking through a part of a city, for example, and this perception can be shared through photographic representations on the platform”, he highlights.

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The system is available to everyone as if it were a place or a space in the city and therefore I invite people to browse the set of images and to take an active stance in relation to the collection by participating in the construction of this collaborative image system”

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For Professor Kalinka Branco, from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Computing (ICMC) at USP in São Carlos in the Department of Computing Systems and one of the researchers responsible for the Arquigrafia operating system, the current mission of the project is to improve the computational part of the platform. “We have deconstructed Arquigrafia in order to verify how it was conceived and how it is structured. This is because we are rebuilding the project so that it becomes more robust, faster, with interactions not only between man and machine, but between more interoperable systems”, says Professor Kalinka.

New Phase: Archigraphy 4.0
With the financial support of Fapesp as a thematic project between 2022 and 2026, the project has just started this new challenge that stands out for the expansion and consolidation of the platform. The Arquigrafia 4.0 Experience intends to address critical questions about the current internet and the Web 4.0 development horizon. For this, the project invests in the possibilities of mutual enrichment between everyday sensitive experience and the construction, organization, representation and recovery of knowledge about cities in the present, in memory and in the design desire for tomorrow.

The coordinator explains that for the consolidation of the system the idea is to integrate new resources to the platform, resources that go beyond representations of photographic images. “We are working to open this understanding of images to a broader scope of materials to be made available by the platform, such as videos, drawings, audio messages, all georeferenced and accessible through mobile devices such as smartphones”, emphasizes Rozestraten.

About the expected advances in this phase, Professor Kalinka adds: “In the computational part, we want a platform that allows a living and an experience not only of learning, but of interaction, participation and integration. We want the platform to be fast and efficient, and to be able to integrate with other existing platforms,” she explains.

From its multidisciplinary aspect, the professor of the computing area also highlights that the multi and interdisciplinarity is something that allows a more active experience and the application of concepts already established in a certain area in another. “This experience leverages and allows science to evolve, and areas to evolve. For computing, it is something that allows us to materialize concepts, techniques, methods and tools that we use and or develop”, she clarifies.

The research team of the Arquigrafia project is dedicated to questions related to interdisciplinary research on the contemporary conditions of constitution of autonomous collaborative environments on the Web, which demands an experimental field of action. This field, on the one hand, resumes the realization of sensitive experiences rooted in concrete and specific places in the city of São Paulo – considering the metropolis as a phenomenon and as a metaphor of conflicting diversity that characterizes the internet – and, on the other hand, it proposes to explore experimentally the “deconstruction” and counter-hegemonic appropriation of elements and functional structures available online such as social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube and others), freeware, open source software, hyperlinks, using the semantic web and of analogies with the notions of: montage, coming from the cinema; collage, fine arts; DIY; and prefabrication, derived from modern industrial architecture.

The idea is that such efforts result in concrete and consistent experimental prototypes for critical autonomy in Web 4.0. In the opinion of the project coordinator, it is intended that such particular experiences – duly analyzed, criticized and improved – provide the basis for a universal, more comprehensive, properly scientific, technological and methodological contribution, which produces theoretical-conceptual references with the potential to be freely reappropriated. “Our perspective is that these aspects have an impact on the transformation, updating, reorientation and revision of guidelines regarding the development of interactions between urban environments and collaborative environments in Web 4.0 for the 21st century”, he concludes.