Cycling and Memorizing Rivers and Landscapes in Urban São Paulo: The Pedal Hidrográfico case study

This essay presents the Pedal Hidrográfico (PH), a regular cycling tour that takes place in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (RMSP) with the objective of feeling out urban landscapes through itineraries that unite neogeography, participatory mechanisms, and energy demand modeling. The PH rides occur weekly and bear titles such as "Central Contour of the 1929 Flood," "Mouth of the Meninos to the Mouth of the Zavuvus," "Dry Valleys of the Tietê from Remédios to Osasco," and "Going Uberaba Upstream and Descending Cupecê with a Desmorrodouro in the Middle," among others. Participants move in varied directions, contributing to the construction of a collective memory around the mosaics of landscapes, anomalies, and rivers in a city that many insist is shapeless, ugly, and dirty, but which reveals itself as a witness to a complex labyrinth where humanity and nature are indistinguishable. From its inception on September 9,2024, to November 12, 2025, the PH led 237 people to traverse 71 distinct routes, delivering a total of 324,186 kilojoules of movement energy to perceive the watercourses. This amount of energy is equivalent to 8 liters of gasoline, although covering the same distance with a motor vehicle would require 2,290 liters of gasoline.It is empirically demonstrated that the bicycle uses 286 times less energy per kilometer than a car to move within the urban site of São Paulo when choosing to pedal along paths that were once obvious but have been buried, obstructed, or erased as possible ways.