20. SEEING THE CITY: A discussion with Junia Mortimer and Felipe Magalhaes

In this episode Tom and Beth are joined by visiting researchers to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, Junia Mortimer and Felipe Magalhães. 

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 Laboratory of Experiments on Image and Architecture.

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.

Key archives/figures mentioned:

Zumvi Afro-Photographic Archive: Lázaro Roberto.

Roberto Monte Mor

Edneia Aparecida de Souza

Ariella Azoulay

Francisco de Oliveira

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: urbanradarpod@gmail.com

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:14

Hello. In this episode of Urban Radar, we discuss how we can see and understand the city in this geopolitical age of conflict and global uncertainty. How can photographs and visual archives help us understand the complexities of cities, particularly those in the global south?

SPEAKER_05 0:31

And when seen directly is not possible, what other approaches can help us analyse the intense volatility of cities impacted by urbanisation and industrialisation processes?

SPEAKER_03 0:40

And taken together, what do these methods mean for urbanists interested in urban change? What endures, what transforms, and how do we validate what counts as knowledge? Welcome to Urban Radar, the podcast taking an urban lens on current affairs. I'm Beth Perry, Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield.

SPEAKER_05 1:01

And I'm Tom Goodfellow, Professor of Urban Development at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. So we're going to get straight into our feature this week, as we've got a really fascinating discussion we want to share with you. Given the current turmoil, volatility, and turbulence of the world, some of the things we talked about in our last episode, uh, and proclamations that the international order as we've known it is ending, what does this mean for how researchers know cities in different parts of the world?

SPEAKER_03 1:27

And this is a critical question for urban studies, actually for all of us, of course, because we have an increasing focus on pluriversal ways of knowing, which challenge some of the global knowledge production systems. So it's really important to consider what kind of multi-layered views of the city emerge, especially when we seek to know some of the same cities, perhaps in the same continent, but in different ways.

SPEAKER_05 1:46

So we're going to be talking about quite a different part of the world here than we've we've often focused on. We'll say more about that at the moment. But also, what's exciting is that we are joined by two researchers today, one of whom is currently based at the University of Sheffield and one at the University of Manchester. Uh Junia Mortimer is an architect and urbanist, an amateur photographer, who focuses on visual cultures and the role of archives, particularly. She usually works uh at the urban planning department at the School of Architecture of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte.

SPEAKER_03 2:15

And Felipe Magaliez is a geographer and political economist who focuses on urban spatial analysis, occupations and contestations over space. And he usually works at the geography department in the same university.

SPEAKER_05 2:37

Okay, so welcome. Let's start by giving you a brief opportunity to introduce yourselves a bit more and your research interests and what you're doing here in the north of England as visiting researchers.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Thank you so much for having me. Uh it's really an honor to be here. So I'm Junior. Um I'm here as a uh Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year, and I'm based at the Urban Institute. Yeah. With me? With Mary and the amazing team of the Urban Institute. Um so I'm actually developing this um project um financed by the USF about Roberto Montimore Visual Collection. Um, and it's called Urban Nature Archives. So the project focuses on his personal collection. So it's about 500 slides, VHS films and field notebooks from the 1970s and nineteen to nineteen nineties trips that he did to Amazonia when he was working there.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Thank you guys. It's really a pleasure to be here. My work is on the crossroads of economic and urban geography. And for the last fifteen years or so I've been working on urban neoliberalism, popular and solidarity economies, deindustrialization, and its links uh to the expansion of finance and the multiplication of extractivism into multiple forms of value extraction from both ecosystems and urban areas. And this is all in Minas Gerais and in the larger region of the Brazilian Southeast, which is the urban and the industrial core of the country where forty-four percent of the population live. And now I I'm a visiting researcher at the University of Manchester, so now a temporary colleague of Tom's. And I'm working at the geography department there on the projects I just mentioned. And I did a big round of field work last year in the metro area of Bellarizo, which focused on deindustrialization. So now I'm working on that material and on some side projects as usual.

SPEAKER_05 4:42

Excellent. I think before we get into some of the issues around the context you work in, the people you've worked with, and the bigger kind of structural changes shaping that part of the world and those cities, I think we want to uh go right down to this this question of how how you see the city, and particularly, Junior, turning to you first, you're trying to see the city through photography. And tell us a bit more about what that means and how you use photography to explore cities.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

I depart from the premise that photography isn't merely representation, so it's actually an urban practice that also produces space. So when someone takes a photograph, multiple performances occur simultaneously. So the act of photographing itself, the social division that it creates, it's Ariela Zulai who comes with that concept, um, the archiving of the content, and later how history gets performed through these images. Um even researching photography becomes performative when we displace it toward a more collective activity rather than a solitary interpretation. Um so, for instance, when I'm working with the photographs of Roberto's archive, um, just to add that Roberto authored the idea of extended urbanization in uh early in in the late 1980s. Uh, so that's why his archive is also like really important um to be studied, I think. So when I worked with his photographs, which is the project that brought me here, I like to use them as prompts for interviews, conversations, so so that the photograph becomes a platform through which to interact, going beyond the visuality and its content. Um so it's more about like what um what happens uh is that the image becomes the place where different ways of seeing interact. So what I see and how I see is a cultural construction. Um so this matter because when we study urban history through photographers, the way I'm proposing, we're not like interpreting what the images show, we're examining how photography divides the world and how visual production can become a source of understanding how space gets produced and appropriated. So in my case, I'm especially interested in the global south because that's where I'm based at. So it's about embodied knowledge. And this is how I operate through photography as a medium, literally, in order to engage with urban issues.

SPEAKER_05 7:13

So I just want to pick up on what you said there about how you're particularly interested in the global south. So obviously, we're we're kind of in a time where um there's debates going on about whether the south and north are in some sense converging, whether it makes sense to make that distinction. Um and it would be interesting to kind of draw out that point about why these photographic methods are particularly important for everyday urban life in the South and and more specifically in the Brazilian context that you work in.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah, I think that context uh is crucial here because um we're talking about like more than 80% of Brazil's built environment is conceived without architects, engineers, or urbanists. So urban planning policies they often reach territories long after those territories have been already settled as, let's say, informal neighborhoods. And meanwhile, uh there's tremendous precarity in archival policies for urban and architectural collections. And we can think of um uh what we called the runway of the archives, when important collections from Brazilian architects were donated to Casa de Arquitetura in Portugal. Um this was targeted as neocolonialism. It happened with Lucio Costa collection, for instance, and he designed Brazilia. And then Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Assis Hayes in Bahia, Ellomaya, and Jovas Cancelos in Belo Horizonte. So this only happens because we don't have adequate national policies for preserving these archives. So, yes, um, there is this frame of understanding the problem through absence, through precarity, but also we can say that that absence stimulates us to understand, to expand our understanding of what an archive is and what it could be, uh, and also where else to look for sources that official records fail to document. So, in that sense, personal, less professional, less professionally oriented photographic archives allow us to grasp this sort of like mundane level of urban reality. So they gives us access, uh they 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.

SPEAKER_03 9:32

That's really interesting because you know, from where we are in a university in the global north, often we know very little about a place like Belo Horizonte or somewhere else, and it's like the first modern planned city, but you're already beginning to kind of unpack these layers of meaning that you can see. And that point about absences also connects to something Tom raised in the last episode around sort of like we don't pay enough attention to what gets left behind or what gets hollowed out when people move or when infrastructure is taken away. Um, I just wanted to ask, before coming back to this point about the archives, can you give like a brief concrete example like of what you're talking about here in terms of your use of the of the photographs?

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Yeah, sure. Um a concrete example uh would be like um I researched the Zoom V Afro Photographic Archive in Salvador. I I was based in Salvador for almost nine years as an assistant professor at the Federal University of Bahia, so it's Northeast Brazil, and I worked closely with Lazzaro Roberto dos Santos, which is who is one of the founders of this archive. And Lazzaro didn't photograph Salvador as an architectural photographer. Um, so he photographed architecture as social activity. So, in the absence of official architectural documentation for what gets framed as informal architecture, um, I argue that his photographs became architectural notations, very literally speaking, drawings with lights. So, for instance, he photographed the faded San Joaquin, which is one of the most important open markets in Salvador, and he's been photographed in this place for nearly 40 years now. And it it was it is where his father worked as a docker. And if we see the documentation that he did about the transformation of the market, and we compare it with the city's plans and project for the area, we can see like really distinct uh narratives about the same place. Um, but I could only see this because I was working with him, so I was building this alliance between very different trajectories. His as a black photographer from Salvador, and mine as a scholar, which also means someone who necessarily belongs to an institution that has a tradition of knowledge expropriation, and someone that's socially read as white, which in Brazil means having access to social privilege. So this building of the alliance is really important because we have very different trajectories, and I don't want to re-enact expropriation. So seeing the photographs together was a way of making it evident that it was not about my own interpretation of the photograph according to my um research sources, um, but it was about the photograph operating as a platform for Lazarus to perform his knowledge, telling stories about the places, about the people, about the situations, by remembering the photographic event when he was there photographing.

SPEAKER_03 12:25

Yeah, I mean it's so interesting. And um just when you're talking about Salvador as well, it reminds me of some of the work of um Abdu Malik Simone, who is also one of your mentors for this Urban Studies Foundation scholarship. But I'm interested to um understand a bit more about what you mean by an archive, because you know you can refer to official records as archives, but we've also got this idea that there are absences, there are archives that are not mandated, these photographic repositories of everyday life. So can you perhaps elaborate on what you mean by an archive and how that's changed for you in your work?

SPEAKER_01 12:53

Sure. Um so I think that um an important shift happens when we move from researching urban planning history to actively teaching and practicing it. So it's no longer about specific archives and what they tell about a city's history, rather, the city itself becomes the archive. So this is pretty much how Sam writes about the topic in his article, The City is an architect.

SPEAKER_03 13:18

Sam Burgham.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Yes. Our colleague at the Urban Institute. Um, so he's been a guest here in the podcast before, so it's nice to connect what I'm saying with his work. So photography becomes one prompt, amongst many others, to activate residents' memory and understand how they read and activate spatial knowledge. And of course, here it's not about like professional photography, it's about vernacular photography, everyday photography. And today with our cell phones, we are all photographers.

SPEAKER_03 13:47

Absolutely. Um Well, I'm not a very good one, I have to say.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

We are in this furry of images, everything is visual. But the thing is that politically speaking, having access to camera in our phones also means having access to techniques of documentation that help people to build a distinct imaginary for their places, which probably distinct to what the mainstream media would portray. So I think that how to engage with this visual production, like which pictures the city in a more intimate, banal, ordinary, and potentially more accurate way, is part of the challenge for researching the urban through this collection.

SPEAKER_03 14:27

Yeah. It seems to me that when you're talking about this, there's there's something else at stake here. It's about whose knowledge matters as much as as much as what knowledge matters when we think about how cities are made and unmade, because that idea that the camera is democratizing the process of documentation, you know, that's very much about the politics of knowledge production, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Yes. I think that um this work is pushing me to question something like really fundamental at the same way. So, do we need to frame those artifacts as archives to give them legitimacy for urban studies? I'm sort of like testing the limits of the archive concept itself. What if we moved beyond needing that frame of legitimacy altogether? So, um, what interests me now is how counter-colonial epistemologies might reshape not just what we study, but how we understand spatial knowledge itself, especially knowledge systems that planning regulations have systematically attempted to eliminate or to render in visible. So, um, why this matter? If we take seriously that most of the built environment in Brazil emerges without professional intervention and that planning often arrives late or maybe not at all, then our methodologies need to fundamentally shift. We need approaches that can see and legitimize spatial knowledge that exists outside institutional frameworks, not by capturing it within academic archives, but recognizing it on its own terms.

SPEAKER_05 16:00

I just want to ask you a bit about some of the geographic spaces in which you work. So you've given us an example of your work in Salvador, and we know you worked in Belo Horizonte, but your work is now centered on the Amazon. Uh, and what new challenges that arise when you're working in that kind of setting?

SPEAKER_01 16:15

That's a very good question. Um so my work in Salvador and Belo Horizonte developed through living in the cities. So my body was there first experiencing the heat, the streets, the social textures. Then I encountered or created archives that helped articulate what I was already sensing. Um so the visual emerged from the sensorial. I could see with Lazzaro Roberto because we could walk Salvador together, or with Ednea in Belo Horizonte because we could navigate Taquariu's neighborhood together. But with Amazonia, I'm facing the opposite situation. I have Roberto's photographs, I'm working with him to understand what he documented, but I have no horizon for accessing those territories, territories bodily in the immediate future. So the Amazon scale, remoteness, and the profound transformation since the 1980s. I mean, I'm working with visual evidence and ethnographic accounts from other authors rather than my own embodied knowledge. And this isn't just a practical limitation, it's an epistemological challenge, reshaping my understanding of what counter-colonial methodology can be. What can I know about Amazonia spatial practices without the sensorial experience that sort of grounded my research so far? So, how do I avoid extractive interpretation when I can't see with the indigenous and rehivating new communities whose knowledge systems Roberto documented? So I think that this distance is forcing me to be more explicit about the limits of archival work and my own positionality. It's pushing me to ask whether counter-colonial methodology can exist across such profound spatial and temporal distances, or whether maybe some forms of knowledge require presence in ways that archives, no matter how carefully approach it, they simply cannot substitute.

SPEAKER_05 18:27

Perhaps now we could turn to Felipe and just hear a little bit about, from your perspective, how important presence is as as a basis for generating spatial knowledge, but also to think about other kinds of perspectives. Um we've talked about photography, we've talked about archives and being present in a city. But you've been looking at histories of urbanization, you've been looking at structural factors, some of the same kinds of context, but not through these photographic or or necessarily present lenses, but more conceptual ones. Uh I'm thinking partly of your paper on urban volatility and the kind of these kind of macro challenges that have been particularly pronounced in Latin America. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your lens on those cities.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

The idea here is to look at urbanization in Latin America through a perspective that's informed by the long history of very high economic volatility that the region has been through in the last several decades, which influences the way cities work, the ways that things are built in cities and people's lives in general terms in urban areas, which are very connected to this general unstable dynamic of ups and downs. So I see urban volatility as kind of a point of departure and as a key for understanding uh Latin American cities and urbanization. We can grasp many practices and dynamics from a temporal perspective that links the economic dimension that's obviously understood in a more open sense here uh to everyday life and to the lived experience of the city. So it's uh many different things from large scale urban projects uh such as uh the the most well known uh maybe is Porto Maravilla in Rio de Janeiro, uh to the the everyday construction practices in favelas. Um I I I think that these uh processes can all be better and understood through the lenses of volatility as kind of a temporal pattern that produces many social and spatial consequences. So uh if I if I can go a little deeper, uh Port Maravilla was uh a large urban development and renewal project that was virtually abandoned after its initial phase that was marked by several major public works that redefined the entire former port area of the city. And because it was abandoned because of the severe economic and political crisis that struck the co the country in uh 2015. And in the other end of the spectrum, maybe if if I can put it that way, the self-construction in favelas and irregular settlements it has its rhythms strongly shaped by this stop and go movement that characterizes economic dynamics in the region, uh which ultimately produces effects on the built environment. So this for me this is a perspective on the urban from the global south, more embedded in in in the Latin American context, which has been marked by this um uh period of crisis and instability. Since the early eighties, shortly after a a phase in which a long phase in which uh those same cities were amongst the most dynamic in the world, right? So in in the post war period up to the public debt crisis in the early eighties that brought industrialization centered developmentalism or the developmentalist. Project to an end, the the continent's major cities grew uh very rapidly, and that was closely tied to the expansion of industrial activity. So the place where we live and work, Belo Horizonte, is an interesting case here. It became a big metropolitan area after because of this directly connected to this history. So after a long cycle of industrial growth. And that took place all over the continent from Mexico to Argentina and in Brazil is from the 1930s to the late 70s. But Belo Rizon was never a city that attracted a lot of attention. It's not largely attractive for tourism. And maybe it's even we could call it a textbook case of what Jennifer Robinson's uh the Jennifer Robinson's idea of an ordinary city, quote unquote. In the sense that it has nothing too special about it. But uh as she proposes, those uh histories are just as important for urbanists as the exceptional cases that attract most of the attention of researchers. Um in there's a funny um aspect of this. In the late 1990s, the travel guide Lonely Planet described Belo Horizonte as quote, the biggest place in the world that you've never heard about, unquote. And today, of course, this title would apply to a number of Chinese cities which began their own trajectories of growth, also linked to uh the growth of industry, very uh fast expanding industrialization, precisely when Latin American metro areas entered into crisis. So there was a shift of dynamism towards East Asia, which left in this traditional development perspective the Latin American metropolises behind, quote unquote.

SPEAKER_03 23:49

It's really interesting how you sort of frame that then within those bigger sort of senses of what kinds of s places are becoming urbanized and which ones we hear about or don't, which doesn't always have anything to do with size. Again, that was like something that we picked up on an earlier episode. Um I mean I've I've sort of interested in your analysis that places such as Bela Horizonte experience this kind of volatility, this sense of being behind, um, because they're caught between the trends of democratization and neoliberalization. Do you want to just briefly expand on that a bit?

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yes. It's um I'm not sure if I would um think about it in a cause and effect relationship, but it it's a it's it has complex relations to to that story of th those forty years uh in the Brazilian case, and there are parallels in other countries, uh in Argentina and Chile and others, of uh these two major forces that produces significant effects on cities, planning, urban policy, and so on and so forth. So democratization and neoliberalization. And the first r uh results the the democratization process that results from the economic crisis that brought down the military regimes in the region in the 1980s and in Chile in 1990, but also from of course a broad process of popular struggle struggle and political mobilization against those dictatorships, which had very important roots in urban issues and also fundamental consequences for cities. As many of these movements eventually came to power in municipal governments across many metropolitan areas. And Belarus is one of those. And on the other, on the other hand, on the other side, maybe neoliberalization, which created this immense and highly varied or variegated mosaic of experiences of advancing commodification with very significant consequences for these metropolitan areas, one of them being precisely the persistence of volatility and deindustrialization being another one. Hyujanir is also an interesting place to look at here because uh many of these urban crisis dynamics uh are very intense there. Um they used to be the nation's capital, and because of that, they never need partially because of that, they never needed to make a bigger effort in regional development projects like Minas Gerais did, uh promoting through the state industrial growth and attracting foreign investment in manufacturing to the region. So after the Capitol moved to Brazil in 1960, the history of Rio is a history of a roller coaster that goes through several crises and periods of euphoria and economic boom. The latest one having been uh driven by the World Cup and the Olympics, which was amazing, right? They hosted both the men's football world cup finals and the Summer Olympics, with only two years between them. And after that, the whole country fell into an economic and political crisis that threw the city back to a very difficult condition. And if you pay attention to the built environment there, this is visible in very material terms, even.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. So isn't there a danger that these kinds of urban histories and geographies are just defined through that crisis and negativity?

SPEAKER_00 27:09

Absolutely. But uh it's not a history or geography that's defined only by that, right? These are highly dynamic cities in terms of inventiveness and the culture and community practices, the bottom-up political practices as well, and in which the landscape of social and cultural movements is intense, creative, and full of potentiality. And so it's I I I depart from a more politico-economic perspective on the urban, and when we shift the perspective to other ways of seeing, through the practice of photography, for instance, there are many other layers that that appear and they connect to this story through this idea of the cultural intensity and and dynamism. So we have to ask, right, well, what do these cultural practices mean or imply or propose in terms of social and political change? Um and the favela itself is a kind of an urban archive of resistance and potentiality for constructing differences, even. And the built environment is only one aspect of this archive, and the stories that people tell are another major living archive, and the favel is a place that is specked with very dense and important stories. But maybe maybe the point here is to ask: what does researching in and through archives reveal us about these quote-unquote potential histories?

SPEAKER_05 28:34

Absolutely. I mean, this is it's just an opportunity, I think, to bring the bring you back more closely into conversation with with one another and get both of your thoughts on that. Because you know, you're you're seeing the city in quite different ways. You're coming from a political, economic, uh, kind of structural lens, and you're you're coming from this real bottom-up focus on lived experience and the archive and and photography, right? So to bring back to that, because it seems to me uh it's really productive to think about the temporality of volatility that you you you expose in your work around Latin America, particularly, and and and the kind of dramatic changes over time that have a real effect on everyday lives, and then how we think about the photograph uh and other kind of artifacts that capture what appears to be a snapshot, something that could change very radically, very quickly, and yet we have a huge number of them. Um I don't know if either we could reflect a bit more on how you see those two lenses intersecting as we try and understand cities in increasing volatility.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

So for me, the the way that the photos from the archive are understood and seen in the present will also change in relation to time and space, right? Um I've been working with this notion these days, or maybe something similar, trying to write a paper with Christina Temenos on the Aaron.

SPEAKER_03 29:49

Christina's at Manchester, yeah, she's the person you're working with there.

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Yes, exactly. On the urban crisis debate. Um so for a South American urbanist, the urban crisis in Europe and North America after 2008 is a little difficult to see. It needs to be contextualized, right? Because our parameters are very different. So there's also this positionality problem in relation to um what is seen depending on who sees, right? And maybe that could work in the direction of strengthening this anti-positivist idea of the of the subjective as all that we can grasp and is all that we have in many moments when when we're doing research. And I say this without any problems with all that political economy stuff, and we just need to find good ways to connect different forms of understanding.

SPEAKER_03 30:38

Like a podcast.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Junior. Um I think that for me, um, what I call impossible architectural archives, which is like the archives where photographs um work as architectural notation, as drawings, as light. I think it's pretty much photography documenting what Philippi called volatility, at least that's how I interpret it. And in this documentation, there is urban change, yes, but there is also persistence. And it's not only the content of what we see on the visual surfaces that um persists, but potentially the experiences that photographs remain from, the ordinary urban practices that shape our environment and produce the city. I'm saying this because I want to bring our attention from the visual surface to the performance of the photograph, to the performance of the photographic event itself. I agree that how we understand space and time affects how we perceive volatility and continuity. But what's interesting about the conceptual frame Philippi proposes is that it works both ways. Our experience, not only our theoretical understanding of volatility and continuity, also affects how we perceive space and time. So the photograph becomes evidence not just of what was there, but how being there felt and how it shaped perception. And when we return to these images, when Roberto and I look at this at his 1980s Amazonian slides together, or when I see Lazarus' photographs of Salvador with him, we're not just seeing what changed and what remained, we're also assessing how change and permanence were experienced, which then reshapes how we understand the urban processes themselves.

SPEAKER_03 32:32

I'm interested to sort of pull out a couple of themes between your work. And one of the things that seems quite strong is that there's these material struggles for the city, and there's also these symbolic struggles for the city. And it plays out through what we often frame as binaries in urban studies, like between planned and organic, or between formal and informal. Do you want to just comment on that theme a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Yeah, sure. Um I think that uh what my scholarship reveals is that um the distinction between planned and organic, formal and informal is itself a colonial planning category that makes the whole thing more opaque than it reveals. So um working with Roberto Montimolo's archive, I see parallel urban systems, what I call urban nature practices. So you have the standardized housing coexisted with that structures following completely different spatial logics. These weren't merely developmental stages, but coexisting urbanizations with fundamentally different ontologies of infrastructure. In Belo Rizon, too, collaborating with community led leader Egenea Souza, we saw that self-built housing revealed sophisticated material intelligence. So it was structural problem solving, environmental adaptation, multi-generational strategies. Planning discourses reads this only as precarity because it lacks tools to recognize architecture without professional drawings. And I think that the symbolic struggle is about who gets to historicize the city. So through the urban archives methodology, combining institutional documents, oral histories, and embodied territorial presence, it became clear that the fight over urban history is also a fight over who belongs, whose claims are legitimate. So modern colonial planning systematically invisibilizes vernacular knowledge because recognizing it would maybe undermine planning's authority. So the stakes are urgent. It's like forest city together, something that Ayutton Krenak proposes as a concept. Well, not as a concept, but as a key to understand um how we could think of the urban uh from now on. Um so I think it becomes essential. Um, but regulations still see this as ruins, not futurities. So what's revealed is actually that formal and informal don't describe urban reality. They describe power relations in the production of knowledge. So I guess that also thinking through the idea of margins as liminal spaces also help us to overcome this apparently excludent duality, which is actually constitutive of the colonial project as well.

SPEAKER_03 35:38

I really like what you've been saying about, you know, we've got to overcome these kinds of binaries, but also logics, haven't we? Because we have this idea, this rational way of seeing that A plus B equals C, but actually it's more of a kind of everything everywhere all at once. It's like this entanglement, isn't it? What about you, Felipe?

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Yeah, I um this is a very important topic. I think it could easily become another conversation. It's so interesting and important. I I followed uh a big round of housing uh squats and um housing movements in the Belo Rosante metro area from 2009 to 2015, in previous work that I was doing related to urban neoliberalism and social movements. And what we see there is that the injustices are so enormous that people need to organize and struggle to get the very basic of all human needs, which is housing. And that changes the way that we look at politics and planning in general. And the symbolic is very central in those struggles. It maybe it's not an exaggeration to say that people will only organize and occupy land that can be turned into their own homes if they have a certain set of beliefs and ideas of what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, so on and so forth. So in relation to the formal and informal, planned and organic, um the critique of the dualist vision that separates those two things, uh uh it's a very important pillar of uh critical urban studies in Brazil. And this is unfortunately not very well known in the Anglophone world. The work of the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira he published the most famous version of this argument in a book called The Critique of Dualist Reason, which focuses on how the modern depends on what it treats as backward for its own growth and advancement and development. But the informal is also modern. It's also a product of a certain kind of modernization which happens in enclaves that try to isolate themselves more and more through gated communities these days and etc. But they know uh deep down that their source of income uh c and their power even comes from the extremely low wages and other factors that uh sit uh on the other side if we look at uh at it this way, right?

SPEAKER_03 38:05

Aaron Ross Powell That's fascinating. I mean the other theme that at least for me comes out across your two bodies of of scholarship is about absences and and memories. And I was thinking in terms of like the politicization of memory uh and the memories of politicization. You know, perhaps that's a way that things connect together. And and it's this politics of the archive. You've both talked about this. You know, one idea of the archive as both the memory of the city, which sanctions or legitimizes what counts as knowledge, but there's another idea of the archive which challenges and opens up these questions of what counts as knowledge and or evidence in the first place. And I think that applies to the kinds of urban archives you're talking about, um, Junior, but but also academic archives. And obviously you mentioned just then that Francisco do Oliveira, I probably haven't pronounced that correctly, has been overlooked as a sociologist. Um, journals or the sort of academic canon also performs this function of an official archive that excludes or includes. And another Latin American scholar that you've mentioned is Roberto Montimore, as a photographer and Latin America theorist. This is really interesting because he was really critical, as you alluded to briefly in the 1980s and the 1990s, to some of the ideas that you work with around extended urbanization. Um, but he's also as a photographer, um, and you're working with those archives. Um, and he's not really sufficiently credited for his contributions to urban theory.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

Yes, uh, this is very important as well. Our publications constitute uh kind of a parallel separate academic circuit of citations, influences, and lineages that you see very partially through the people who put an effort into publishing in English, which is not something easy to do. It's a very particular path for Latin American academics. And I think this is changing in a positive direction. Uh but there are many we hear stories that circulate. Even people like Milton Santos, who was the black geographer from Bahia who won the Votran Ludw Prize in the fourth year that it was awarded back in 1994. He would talk about a certain avoidance of sending work to Anglophone journals uh because of the need to frame everything in a way and in a repertoire that the reviewers would recognize. So there's an academic language that goes way beyond the actual language itself, and it's not easy to learn to translate and uh transit between them. Uh, Roberto's case in relation to his pioneering work on extended urbanization is a good example of what these exclusions uh can imply. The translation of his first piece to English only appeared in 2015, more than 20 years after his first article in Portuguese. But but of course, this is a classic problem in academia. There's a very famous case with uh Michal Kalecki's work on uh effective demand uh in macroeconomics that was published in Polish before Keynes published his own ideas on the same topic. And of course Kalecki didn't get the credit for proposing the idea first.

SPEAKER_03 41:03

Yeah, well I didn't know that. I mean I think there's going to be all kinds of stories like that. And um you've just reminded me actually that at some point we must share with everyone the um the videos of a workshop we had on called Untranslatable, which was all about these kinds of linguistic politics. And you know, it can sound like an issue that's just bracketed for the academy, but it's not. You know, the UK government at the moment's got a big push on multilingualism in schools. Um and we've made the point earlier in this podcast that actually that is the beginning of a journey of accepting multilingual futures and multilingual realities, but it stops short of the academy, doesn't it? So there is often nowhere to go, and then English validates what counts as truth. Um yeah, Junior, turn to you.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

Um I think that the politics of the archive um it operates at multiple scales. And I think that Roberto's trajectory demonstrates this very well. Um his 1980s photographs of the Amazon documented his malaria field work and later became evidence of his extended urbanization theory. But what is extraordinary is that the archive kind of betrays the concept. While Roberto searched for industrial capitalist urbanization extended into forests, his photographs preserved what his theory maybe couldn't name at the time, which is like people and forest as infrastructure, river and spatial practices, hybrid systems exceeding his framework. So I think the theoretical archive with journals, citations, canonical text, um, they operate through inclusion-exclusion, determining whose concepts circulate globally. I think that Hoberto's contribution remains underrecognized in Anglophone urban studies despite being foundational. But I think that photographics, photographic archives, they exceed authority of intention. So they preserve potentialities that the photographers did not consciously document. Um and I think that working with the Zumvi archive alongside Lazarum, uh, working with Roberto or working with Edinaya Souza in Takaryu with her visual montages around Belo Rizzonte, I think that what counts as evidence becomes clear. It's produced through interpretive practices. It's not inherent to the materials. So seen with as a research gesture, allowed for photographs to become architectural drawings, revealing spatial epistemologies that professional documentation excludes. So I think the challenge isn't adding excluded voices to existing archive. It's rather recognizing dominant e stems systematically produce absence.

SPEAKER_05 43:51

So when we started planning this feature, uh you said you didn't think that you had that much in common with each other in terms of your work, which is quite puzzling because we Can in fact reveal you're actually a couple who came in together with your son for this first sabbatical. So has preparing yourselves for this podcast actually helped you find more connections between your work? Or are you still arguing at the dinner table about who sees the city most authentically?

SPEAKER_01 44:18

I think we argue more about who's cleaning the dishes afterwards. It doesn't everyone.

SPEAKER_03 44:25

Sure your your your son, right? Put him to work.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

Yeah, that's true. But seriously, um I think that our trajectories as early career researchers matter here. We built a significant part of our academic careers in different institutions in Brazil with quite different intellectual traditions. So I was in Salvador for nearly nine years at the Federal University of Bahia, while Felipe was in Belo Rizonte at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. So I think that that geographical separation shaped how we see our work, not always in dialogue with each other. And I think that this reflects a broader challenge in urban studies, not just in Brazil, but maybe I would say globally. We have like different schools of thinking. One is more structured around traditional urban studies, even if it is critical, but it's developed by people also who work closely with the state. It might be more focused on policy and political economy. And I think that another line of thinking, amongst others, brings a more anthropological or maybe archaeological approach, taking sensorial knowledge into play to understand the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, to think of Francière. So I think we're now seeing more collaborative work bridging these different approaches and bringing them into a productive friction. So I think that yes, preparing for this podcast has helped us recognize that this friction between our perspectives isn't just about our relationship, it's actually a matter of epistemic urgency. So we need both. The structural analysis of volatility and crisis that Filippi offers and the counter-colonial visual methodologies that attend to what persist and resist within those very conditions.

SPEAKER_03 46:22

Maybe I'll turn to Felipe. Um, since Tom has now uh moved to the University of Manchester, you know, you can answer the previous question as well. But which city is is better? Settle it for us, Sheffield or Manchester?

SPEAKER_00 46:33

Yeah, that's a tricky one. Let me see if I can dribble it without losing the ball. To be fair to my reference to Jenny Robinson's ordinary cities, maybe they're each very good in their own league, right? If I have to avoid the evasive answer, I'd say that I grew up in a bigger city and I really enjoyed the heterogeneity, the crowds, and the movements. But I also like the parks and the quietness. So maybe it's like comparing an amazing football team with an excellent basketball team. But I enjoy looking through and beyond the major structural differences in relation to Belarus Ancient Minas Gerais, and it's funny how this part of the UK is in like a high-income global north context, while we are in a middle-income country that's much more unequal and unfair. But there are many similarities apart from the rolling hills and the seas of pasture with very old towns in the middle. And the second-tier cities as well, which are these unique semi-peripheral urban geographies that create really interesting things while no one is watching, right? And so both places have a strong history with mining, and the industrialization has left a major and very recent scar, mostly for the working classes. And there are some funny cultural parallels. People can be more reserved, they tend not to be very direct or say exactly what they think. They can be very methodical and wary. They will not easily trust anyone. The food is equally strong and goes very well with the drinking. But for you guys to fully understand that, you have to you have to go over there and see what I mean, and you'd be most welcome.

SPEAKER_03 48:08

Well, definitely like to do that. And la last word over to you, Junior. Um I think that they seem very different to me. This is Manchester and Sheffield again now, not yeah, not back in Latin America.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

Yeah. So um I think that yes, they seem very different to me. And one is sort of a London miniature, and the other a Green City. Um I diplomatically say I like both, but I don't really know Manchester beyond a day trip, so I really lack embodied experience to compare. What I can say is that I have a personal bond with Sheffield. I first came here as an Erasmus mastery student to what's now the extinguished department of modern language. And I think that when I returned 15 years later as a USF fellow, the first thing I did was walk without a map, trying to navigate the urban landscape through memory alone.

SPEAKER_03 48:57

Um did you get lost?

SPEAKER_01 48:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 49:00

That's the best way to know a city, though, which I suspect is where you're going with this.

SPEAKER_01 49:04

That's the thing. So um so Sheffield has changed significantly in that time frame, another kind of volatility, of course, and continuity. But the body remembers differently than the mind. And then that embarrassed knowledge of a city, the slope of certain streets and how light falls at particular corners, it creates attachments that transcend institutional changes or urban transformations. So perhaps my answer isn't really about which cities better, but about how cities archive themselves in our bodies and how that embodied memory creates loyalties that rational comparison can't really capture.

SPEAKER_03 49:45

Beautifully said. And we're gonna have to wrap up there, guys. So thank you both so much for coming on. Our first feature with University of Manchester and University of Sheffield associated colleagues. Um it's been an absolute pleasure. Um, so yeah, thank you very much. Thank you for coming on.

SPEAKER_00 50:00

It was great, it was a pleasure and an honour.

unknown 50:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:12

So that was a really important conversation, I think. Um we need to digest it to a certain extent. Um, there's two things it makes me think about. I mean, firstly, um I was at a workshop last month on the epistemic tangles of urban inhabitation, um, which was also actually sponsored by the Urban Studies Foundation with Parosh Banaji, Raphael Bear, and um Ishita Chatterjee. And it there was some really excellent early career scholars who are around the world, who are really trying also to engage in their own contexts about how we can make sense of the complexity of what's going on at the moment. And I was really struck by that phrase that Junior left us with the epistemic urgency of the moment, of bringing these different knowledge systems together, different methods together that help us see and layer our understanding of what's happening within cities at the moment.

SPEAKER_05 50:57

Yeah, and it really got me thinking in this conversation about that relationship between embodied experience, doing research somewhere, and specifically photography, actually. You know, I find that really productive because in my own experience, there are cities where I've done extended periods of field work, and then there are places where I've been much more arm's length through comparative projects with partners and wanted to spend more time in places but not been able to for some reasons. And even if you cut out all of the other forms of data, whether it's interview material, whether it's talking to people, online, or there's something about photographs that are very important for knowing somewhere you can't go to. But you don't have those same effective connections. Like so much of my what I think I understand about places I've done research in personally for long periods is actually about the embodied experience of being in that place. And it colours and biases probably my understanding in various ways. So thinking about the different opportunities and challenges and risks of the embodied versus the more visual, kind of received experience from Yeah. So it got me thinking about that. Um and it's also I realize I kept mispronouncing Bello Horizonte and Bello Horizonte.

SPEAKER_03 52:02

I'm not going to pretend to be able to pronounce it. I did I did ask Junior to send me a voice note of how to pronounce um both of their names so that I didn't get it wrong. Um, because these things do matter, of course. I mean the other thing it made me think about was like this idea that um Felipe said of the the the stop start of urban change and junior's response to your question that photographs aren't just capturing a moment, but they are also a way of documenting change. And um it made me think of like the idea of the paradox, like and just drawing on like Greek philosopher Zeno's idea of the arrow paradox, right? Do you know this one? I don't. So an arrow in flight, they argue, is also at rest. It's always at rest, because at any moment that arrow is still occupying the same space.

SPEAKER_05 52:41

Sounds a bit quantum.

SPEAKER_03 52:42

And it is exactly that's where I was going. So at any moment it's still occupying the same space. So motion is comprised of a lot of different moments of stillness. Therefore, the Greek philosophers argued, the arrow is always not in flight, but actually always still. Um and then Aristotle developed that to say, well, it's not really just about motion and starts and stops, but it's about a flow of time. And I think it's quite interesting because just thinking, you know, that's like a particular knowledge system that is conceiving of time and space in a particular way. And of course, that's been challenged a lot now by alternative knowledge systems, by quantum theory, as you say, and quantum mechanics. Uh, where we're thinking very differently about time and space and motion and change and what that actually means. So when we think with different knowledge systems and ways of understanding the world, we can see all of these questions quite differently.

SPEAKER_05 53:26

I think that may be a more profound learning than my potentially having a better pronunciation of elephant.

SPEAKER_03 53:31

It's true. Well, I have been thinking about paradoxes, but um, well, that's all we've got time for today, so thanks for listening and tune in next time.

SPEAKER_05 53:39

Thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_03 53:40

Bye.