Between Concrete and Forest: Documentary Photography, Environmental Memory, and the Resignification of Urban Space

Entre el concreto y el bosque: fotografía documental, memoria ambiental y resignificación del espacio urbano

This article analyzes the Pazipê Project, a socio-environmental regeneration initiative developed in downtown São Paulo, as a case study to investigate the relationships between documentary photography, urban communication, and the construction of environmental memory. Moving away from descriptive approaches focused exclusively on the ecological dimension of the intervention, the research understands environmental memory as a communicational construction produced through the public circulation of images capable of attributing new meanings to urban spaces. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, exploratory approach based on the case study method. The research corpus consists of the mini-documentary that won the 11th MegaCities ShortDocs Festival, photographic records produced during the research, and images circulated on Instagram and in university extension exhibitions developed by the Advertising program at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie. The analysis uses an analytical device to understand what photography communicates about urban space that its materiality alone would not be able to reveal. The results demonstrate that documentary photography operates as a communicational practice capable of producing environmental memory, making community-based processes of socio-environmental regeneration visible, and resignifying territories marked by urban invisibility. The proposed analytical model contributes to communication studies by understanding documentary photography as a mediation between territory, memory, and the circulation of meanings, offering a perspective capable of engaging with challenges shared by different Latin American cities.