The visibility of the city as cartography

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the categories of space proposed by Ferrara (2002) as methodological strategies for the apprehension of the city and how they relate to cartography. According to this perspective, the city is built through distinct spatialities, whose phenomenal apprehension occurs through visuality, which implies, primarily, the exercise of the situationist drift and the flaneur's wandering. Visibility involves the representation of the experience of the city by means of diagrams and cartographies, through which one can de facto delineate the multiplicities that continuously construct and redefine the city. Finally, communicability implies putting into relation different cartographies and, with this, inferring possible meanings. Through this discussion, we seek to explain how the production of knowledge about the city cannot do without experience, even if it is not limited to it.