The new city limits in a cartography based on proximity
For a long time, the urban map was a matter of boundaries: what was a city, what was a countryside; where one municipality ended and the other began.
It was a game of clear lines, but the game changed, the lines blurred.
Mapfry is proposing a new way of looking at the territory: instead of fixed limits, layers of interaction; instead of political maps, living limits, which breathe the social, economic and spatial dynamics of everyday life.
This is the core of the concept of Urban Limits.
More than drawing boundaries, it helps us to understand like cities connect and Where life really happens.
These boundaries aren't just geographical, they reveal Ecologies of proximity, coexistence architectures and mobility frames that design contemporary urban space on three main scales:
- Immediate integration areas: intermunicipal choreography, where neighboring cities are intertwined in a ballet of continuous flows
- Population arrangements: we removed the fictitious border between integrated cities
- Proximity Cores: the internal microcosms of each city, where life pulsates, where everything is a walk away
Areas of immediate integration: the city beyond the city
Imagine looking at the night map of Brazil as seen from space.
What you see are not administrative boundaries, but light grids, constellations of urban activity that extend without asking permission to political boundaries.
It is this invisible reality that Mapfry now reveals.
Population arrangements: the network city
It is no longer rare for a person to live in one municipality, work in another and shop in a third.
Relationships don't respect political geography; they draw their own mesh.
These new limits are an attempt to capture this logic: clusters of cities that, in practice, already function as a single metropolitan body.
Thinking about them in isolation would be like trying to understand the unconscious part of the whole.
Population arrangements:: the density that overflows
Here we enter a more subtle point: when the urban fabric thickens to such an extent that cities merge. Not officially, but functionally.
Have you ever crossed an avenue and didn't realize that you had entered another city?
That's the conurbation phenomenon. A continuous urban territory, where legal boundaries have become invisible.
Esses population groupings They are areas where the city goes beyond its own limits territories in which the urban supersedes the municipal perspective.
Cores of proximity: the microcosm
If as Integration areas They talk about the city as a system, Proximity Cores speak of the city as a daily experience.
These centers are urban microcentralities, which do not obey the logic of official neighborhoods, nor the cartography of the city hall.
These are the parts of the city that make sense to those who live there, where everything is close by, where the bakery, school and bus stop are within easy reach.
It is about recognizing that the city is not just a group of zones; it is a ecosystem of human interactions.
A new cartography for a new reality
Geographer Milton Santos used to say that space is the result of action, it is materialized history.
In this sense, the Urban Limits by Mapfry they are not just lines on the map: they are spatial narratives.
They tell us Where do people actually live, Where do they travel, Where do they live together, Where do they work. They don't just tell us where the city is.
Three ideas define this approach:
Integrated scale:
Just as an organism depends on the synchrony between its organs, the city must function in a coordinated manner between the regional and the local.
Proximity as a strategy:
The logic is the same as that of a well-played board game: Strengthen strategic points and the expansion will be natural, efficient, sustainable.
Planning based on lived reality:
With the new limits, managers now have not only a map, but a compass that points to where the city It already is, even though the official map doesn't recognize it yet.