Carvalho, Bruno. Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (from the 1810s Onward). Liverpool, UK: Liverpool UP, 2013. xv + 235 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Works Cited. Index (original) (raw)
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MARLAS: Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 2018
Winner of the 2014 Brazilian Studies Association Roberto Reis Book Award, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro offers a fascinating intervention into a number of fields that, ultimately, Carvalho weaves together to form a nuanced reading of the former Brazilian capital as a “porous city,” a clever and convenient near homophone of the concept of porosity the author develops throughout. The book is a highly recommended read for those with a moderate to strong foundation in Brazilian history and culture, though its chapters would serve as useful supplementary material for the graduate classroom. The author does a fine job of moving at an appropriate pace, and his conclusions never seem hastily formulated or exaggerated. Most of all, the considerable research that has gone into the work is commendable and offers plenty of jumping off points for those who would seek to build upon Carvalho’s reading of porosity.
2012
The aim of this article is to discuss the establishment of the urban space of São Paulo at the beginning of XX century that restores the opening of a great field of studies for the understanding of discourse practices that were established about the city at the same moment that it was built. With the physical expansion of the city, it was possible to create new institutions, which had promoted the scientific ideas practices on hygienic ideals of the time, as well as, had stimulated the quarrels on the Brazilian and establish nationalistic ideas through intense propaganda. They had allowed a field of performance for the elite educated in the city, closing, in certain way, the circuit farmers/education/urban activities. The scientific ideas and the formal education had got to be part of the class marks distinction of the elite, which, at least for part of it, found in the urban institutions a performance field in its activities beyond the politics. São Paulo becomes the privileged field for the application of discourse practices that aim at the control and the conformation of the individuals. These practices consist of enunciated that have origin in several places that are correlated (biology, education, nationalism, etc.).
The Water that Washes the Past: New Urban Configurations in Post-Colonial Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, Heritage & Society., 2020
This paper explores the ways in which officially sanctioned colonial heritage is being moved, removed, reinvented, reinterpreted and reused by official heritage authorities, by social movements, agents and sectors of civil society, in two historically and culturally entangled cities: Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. The cities are entangled in a process framed by their imperial – colonial relationship: because of the trafficking of enslaved Africans at their ports, for both cities being national capitals, and until the nineteenth century, the imperial nature of both cities. The inherent tensions in this process reveal the porosity of the authorized heritage discourse concerning local practices that transform meanings, and that act as openings for the reinvention of a heritage that transitions from colonial to decolonial.
Brooklyn -Samba, politics and struggle in southern Brazil
This article presents the results of a case study carried out in the city of Porto Alegre (Brazil). Using cartography tools, the research analyzed the experience of Brooklyn, a space produced by the communal use of Imperatriz Leopoldina viaduct lower span, in the central area of Rio Grande do Sul capital. From a theoretical approach that considers the materiality of structures and the unpredictability of urban environments as opportunities for communication, the study demonstrates the contribution of bottom-up practices in Urban Regeneration (UR) processes, making a relation between local conflicts around these initiatives and their potential to question the rule of urban planning as a device for spatial segregation. Questo articolo presenta i risultati di un caso studio condotto nella città di Porto Alegre (Brasile). Utilizzando strumenti cartografici, la ricerca ha analizzato l'esperienza di Brooklyn, uno spazio prodotto dall'uso comunitario del viadotto Imperatriz Leopoldina, nella zona centrale della capitale gaucho. A partire da un approccio teorico che considera la materialità delle strutture e l'imprevedibilità degli ambienti urbani come opportunità di comunicazione, lo studio dimostra il contributo delle pratiche bottom-up nei processi di Rigenerazione Urbana (UR), mettendo in relazione i conflitti locali intorno a queste iniziative e il loro potenziale per mettere in discussione la funzione della pianificazione urbana come dispositivo di segregazione spaziale.