Hugo López

Hugo Lopez is an urban researcher interested in spatial justice for marginalised urban territorialities. He is currently a PhD candidate at Sheffield University, a collaborator with the UCCRN European Hub on the Horizon Europe Project UP2030 (up2030-he.eu), and a member of the TU Delft Centre for the Just City (just-city.org). His doctoral research approaches the Atlantic Forest as an urban project. This work develops a counternarrative of the forest's urbanisation alongside the memories and aspirations of a quilombola community in Rio de Janeiro, aiming to co-produce understandings of urban-environmental relations and just sustainability transitions.

Atlantic Forest as an urban project: Recognition of pluriversal territorialities from Rio de Janeiro

This research revisits urbanisation processes in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest through an urban-environmental relational perspective (Escobar, 2017, 2024; Limonad & Monte-Mór, 2022), advancing the recognition of pluriversal territorialities in urban and environmental debates. The project focuses on a historically marginalised territoriality of a quilombo (communities of Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples) in a forest landscape currently demarcated as a conservation unit (also focusing on more-than-humans relations in these settings), identifying a myriad of hopeful ways of relating, ranging from material production, to cunning engagements with regulatory frameworks, to placing ontogenesis in the everyday life of organising the territory. These enact distinct approaches to land relations, reconcile urban and nature, and articulate counternarratives of urbanisation processes. Specifically, the project engages with the past, present, and future, rememorating and reimagining the Atlantic Forest as an urban project. For that, it uses a process-based approach to reach its objectives, combining creative, engaging, anachronic, and critical methods in which concepts, practices, and findings evolve in relation to one another (Mazzei, 2020), combining archival, spatial, and ethnographic methods. Crucially, fieldwork engages directly with the quilombola community through structured interviews, participatory research, multimedia documentation, sensory and creative methods, and pedagogical explorations. These approaches aim to capture everyday practices, territorial negotiations, and insurgent urbanities, revealing how communal, ancestral, and ecological knowledge shapes the urban–natural. The project aims to examine and foreground the relational, material-symbolic, ancestral and prefigurative character of territorialities emerging from socio-spatial dynamics in marginalised territories in Rio de Janeiro’s Atlantic Forest and critically engage with institutional responses to these ancestral (Krenak, 2022) and emergent urban spaces (Horn et al., 2018) offering novel conceptual and methodological frameworks to co-produce with territorialities and prompt conceptions of territory and urbanity invaluable for urban debates towards justice-driven governance of sustainability transitions.

Supervisors: Dr Philipp Horn, Dr Olivia Casagrande and Professor Vanesa Castan Broto