São Paulo's Image Duplication Crisis: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

São Paulo's municipal government is facing a growing technical crisis it helped create. Duplicate image files embedded in city databases — from official permit records on Paulista Avenue redevelopment projects to flooding documentation in the Pinheiros floodplain — have inflated storage costs, slowed public access systems and muddied accountability in at least three major urban programs, according to documents reviewed by The Daily São Paulo.

The timing matters. Mayor Ricardo Nunes is pushing a R$2.4 billion digital transformation agenda through Secretaria Municipal de Inovação e Tecnologia for 2026, and file redundancy is one of the most stubborn, least glamorous obstacles standing between the city and functional e-government. Urban tech specialists who work with municipal contracts say the problem is older than Nunes's administration and has been passed from one management cycle to the next without a durable fix.

How the Problem Accumulated

The duplication issue traces back to at least 2019, when the city migrated legacy records from its GeoSampa urban mapping platform to a newer cloud infrastructure managed partly through Centro de Processamento de Dados — the municipal IT authority headquartered on Rua Líbero Badaró in the Centro district. Engineers who worked on that migration have described, in technical forums and industry panels, a process where image assets were copied rather than referenced, seeding thousands of redundant files across departmental servers.

The problem is not cosmetic. Redundant geospatial images of the Marginal Tietê corridor, for example, create conflicting baselines when engineers model flood-risk zones — a direct planning liability in a city that lost an estimated R$800 million to flood damage in the summer of 2025, according to figures published by the state government's Instituto Geológico. When the same aerial image of a Zona Leste drainage basin exists in five different versions with five different timestamps, engineers cannot always agree on which snapshot represents ground truth.

Specialists at Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas, the public research body based in Cidade Universitária, have been consulting with the Secretaria Municipal de Infraestrutura e Obras on a deduplication protocol for geographic image sets. The work has been underway since March 2026 but has not produced a public timeline for completion.

What Officials and Industry Figures Are Saying

City Hall has not issued a formal statement specifically addressing image duplication as a discrete infrastructure problem, and no named official has spoken on record to this newspaper about remediation costs or a rollout schedule. The Secretaria de Inovação e Tecnologia declined to provide figures on total storage overhead attributed to duplicate files when contacted this week.

Independent technologists who advise São Paulo's growing govtech sector — concentrated around startups in the Vila Madalena and Faria Lima corridors — say the city needs a centralised digital asset management standard before any meaningful deduplication can hold. Without one, each secretaria continues to manage images in isolation, and duplicates re-emerge within months of any manual clean-up effort.

The federal government's own experience offers a cautionary parallel. The Ministério da Gestão e da Inovação em Serviços Públicos in Brasília spent roughly three years between 2020 and 2023 standardising file naming and storage protocols across federal portals before measurable gains in retrieval speed were recorded, according to a 2024 report by the Tribunal de Contas da União.

For São Paulo, the path forward appears to involve both technical and political decisions. Any deduplication effort that touches permit records, environmental licensing files or the city's SIURB urban information system requires legal sign-off on which version of a document holds official standing — a question that moves the problem out of IT and into municipal legal offices on Viaduto do Chá. Until those frameworks are settled, engineers and archivists say the redundant images will keep piling up, one upload at a time.