Mapping the Historical Environments of the Guanabara Bay: Visualizing Changing Landscapes in Colonial Brazil

Alida Metcalf, Rice University

To be a colony is to experience enormous and visible transformations in political, economic, and social life. Each of these broad areas of change also affected the environment. In colonial Brazil, sugar plantations, tobacco farms, and cattle ranches established new landscapes that replaced traditional hunting, foraging, and farming grounds of native peoples. In the case of Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil’s most important ports and its second colonial capital, environmental changes came to the entire Guanabara Bay Basin. As the city of Rio and the towns and agricultural hinterlands around the bay grew, swamps were drained, lagoons filled, rivers straightened, and beaches reshaped. These changes accompanied a complete reassessment of the value of environmental features. In this paper, I use georeferenced historical maps and geolocated historical imagery as well as historical texts, to outline how the environment of the Guanabara Bay Basin can be reconstructed and visualized in imagineRio (https://www.imagineRio.org). Particular attention will be paid to water features: rivers, lagoons, and mangroves. The goal is to create a process through which the history of environmental features can be hypothesized and mapped over three hundred years. Eventually making this available in imagineRio offers the residents of the modern Guanabara Bay Basin a deeper understanding of their environmental history and possibly new ways to begin to reclaim and to restore the degraded state of the modern bay.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 99. Project Development