They discuss:
- How can we see and understand the city in this geopolitical age of conflict and global uncertainty?
- How can photographs and visual archives make visible the complexities of cities, particularly those in the Global South?
- When seeing directly is not possible, what other approaches can help us analyse the intense volatility of cities impacted by urbanisation and industrialisation processes?
- What do these methods mean for urbanists interested in urban change? What endures, what transforms and how do we validate what counts as knowledge?
Guests:
Junia Mortimer is an Assistant Prof at the Department of Urban Planning at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. She is currently an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. She has curated exhibitions including Urbanos Arquivos (2023) in Salvador, which won first prize in the 2024 Arquisur Competition and she coordinates the Laboratório de Estudos de Imagem e Arquitetura.
We don't have adequate national policies for preserving these archives. So yes, there is this frame of understanding the problem through absence, through precarity. But also we can say that that absence assimilates us to understand, to expand our understanding of what an archive is and what it could be, and also where else to look for sources that official records fail to document. So in that sense, personal... less professionally-oriented photographic archives allow us to grasp this sort of like mundane level of urban reality...they give us access to non-institutional urban life, to cities built by people themselves who are struggling to secure a place to live when state policies work almost against them.
Junia Mortimer
Felipe Magalhães is an Assistant Prof at the Department of Geography, UFMG, Brazil and Visiting Fellow at University of Manchester. He has been working on popular and solidarity economies, deindustrialization and extractivism in the Brazilian context. He has recently published in the journals , Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, IJURR and Antipode.
So I see urban volatility as kind of a point of departure and as a key for understanding Latin American cities and urbanization. We can grasp many practices and dynamics from a temporal perspective that links the economic dimension that's more obviously understood in a more open sense here to everyday life and to the lived experience of the city. So it's many different things: from large-scale urban projects - such as the most well-known maybe is Porto Maravilha in Rio de Janeiro - to the everyday construction practices in favelas. I think that these processes can all be better understood through the lenses of volatility as kind of a temporal pattern that produces many social and spatial consequences.
Felipe Magalhães