What is this?
Urban Parallax is a visual research blog that compares urban spaces — always in pairs. Each comparison sets two cities side by side and asks: what does the difference tell us about each place?
The default pair is São Paulo and Rotterdam. But any two cities can be compared. Oslo vs Rome. Tokyo vs Lagos. The format is the lens — what you put through it is open.
The format
Every comparison has a left side and a right side. A main image. A punchy quick-facts table. And a deep-dive text written by a contributor who knows the place from the inside.
We're interested in the specifics — the particular texture of a bicycle lane, the particular smell of a market, the particular argument a highway generates. The data you can look up. The texture you have to go.
The contributors
Architect and researcher based in São Paulo. Interested in informal urbanism, density, and the social life of infrastructure.
Urban designer based in Rotterdam. Interested in water management, cycling infrastructure, and the politics of public space.
The name
Parallax: the apparent displacement of an object when viewed from two different positions. When you look at a city from inside it, you see one thing. When you look at a different city and then look back, you see something else — not because the city changed, but because your viewpoint did.
That's what we're doing here.
