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Street Matters links urban policy and planning with street protests in Brazil. It begins with the 2013 demonstrations that ostensibly began over public transportation fare increases but quickly grew to address larger questions of inequality. This inequality is physically manifested across Brazil, most visibly in its sprawling urban favelas. The authors propose an understanding of the social and spatial dynamics at play that is based on property, labor, and security. They stitch together the history of plans for urban space with the popular protests that Brazilians organized to fight for property and land. They embed the history of civil society within the history of urban planning and its institutionalization to show how urban and regional planning played a key role in the management of the social conflicts surrounding land ownership. If urban and regional planning at times benefited the expansion of civil rights, it also often worked on behalf of class exploitation, deepening spatial inequalities and conflicts embedded in different city spaces.
Designed as a survey and focused on key examples and movements arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this is the first comprehensive history of modern architecture in Latin America in any language. Runner-up, University Co-op Robert W. Hamilton Book Award, 2015 Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia is an introductory text on the issues, polemics, and works that represent the complex processes of political, economic, and cultural modernization in the twentieth century. The number and types of projects varied greatly from country to country, but, as a whole, the region produced a significant body of architecture that has never before been presented in a single...
"Rather than glorifying the phenomenon of popular modernism or holding it up to the paradigmatic examples of good architecture, this book serves as a bridge to understand the complexities of the phenomenon's location and context as well as how popular and how modern buildings labeled popular modernist really are." "Defining the phenomenon of popular modernism in architecture, Fernando Luiz Lara introduces its characteristic place and time. Based on an analysis of five hundred photographs, Lara then describes the physical characteristics of modernist buildings, locating popular modernism within the context of the challenges faced by architecture. Readers begin to discover how the meanings of modernism are specifically manifested in Brazil within the larger context of Latin American and global modernism."--BOOK JACKET.
2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Architecture and Urban Planning 2022 Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Book Award, Honorable Mention Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city’s spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior? Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana María León follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalit...
In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies...
This collection of essays presents an innovative and provocative set of concepts to understand the spaces of the Americas through local lenses. The disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter; however, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge in these fields originates in another continent and is external to the lived experience in such regions. The book introduces seven new concepts that have not been sufficiently addressed, and would make a significant contribution to the field: namely, gridded spaces; spaces of agriculture; space as image; watered spaces; spaces as labor; racialized spaces; and gendered spaces. This book, thus, introduces a broader conceptual framework to foster the analysis of the spatial histories of the Americas.
This is a book about how the worlds of design and activism (could) inspire each other. As Design and its conceptual, functional, aesthetic, speculative and interventional concepts inevitably affect our lives, it often actively interferes in common definitions, understandings and opinion making, which offers opportunities for ideological engagement (in a good or in a bad sense). The book focuses on theories and practices related to the role of Design in terms of addressing, provoking and creating political discourse. Starting from traditional forms of protest, visual languages of resistance, to new forms of digital participation, this will help us to better understand the rituals, structures and meanings of design activism in history and the present, clarifying that design is intrinsically social and supremely political. And it shall help us to derive arguments and examples for the transformative potential of future design (and) activism.
As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress. Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban...
This essential book unravels the link between regional cultures, adaptive reuse of existing buildings and sustainability. It concentrates on the social dimensions relating to Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s late adaptive reuse projects and works from the 1960s to the early 1990s, interpreting her themes, technical sources and design strategies of the creation of luxury as sustainability.The edited book charts how Lina Bo Bardi “invented” her own version of sustainability, introduced this concept through her landscape and adaptive reuse designs and through ideas about cross-cultures in Brazil. The book offers a critical reflection, exploration and demonstration of the importance of ...
Latin American cities have always been characterized by a strong tension between what is vaguely described as their formal and informal dimensions. However, the terms formal and informal refer not only to the physical aspect of cities but also to their entire socio-political fabric. Informal cities and settlements exceed the structures of order, control and homogeneity that one expects to find in a formal city; therefore the contributors to this volume - from such disciplines as architecture, urban planning, anthropology, urban design, cultural and urban studies and sociology - focus on alternative methods of analysis in order to study the phenomenon of urban informality. This book provides a thorough review of the work that is currently being carried out by scholars, practitioners and governmental institutions, in and outside Latin America, on the question of informal cities.