无人机测绘让里约贫民窟从阴影中浮现
Above the chaotic tangle of corrugated roofs and winding alleyways that characterise Rio de Janeiro's favelas, a small drone hums with quiet purpose. Its operator, a young cartographer trained not in a university lecture hall but by years of navigating the community's unmarked paths, pilots the device with the concentration of a surgeon. Each flight captures thousands of overlapping images that will later be stitched into an ultra-high-resolution orthomosaic map — a document that many of these neighbourhoods have never possessed in their entire history.
Such cartographic exercises are more than mere technical feats; they constitute a quiet reclamation of geographic agency. Across the global South, from the labyrinthine slums of Kibera in Nairobi to the densely packed warrens of Dharavi in Mumbai, informal settlements have long existed as blank spots on official maps, rendered invisible by the state’s unwillingness or inability to survey them. This absence perpetuates a cycle of marginalisation: without coordinates, there can be no postal addresses, no reliable waste collection routes, and no systematic integration into city planning.
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