The Self-Built City: Material Politics and Ecologies of Difference in São Paulo (1947-present)

The book analyzes how race, gender, and class have been critical in the constitution of specific ecologies (self-built homes, material repairs, bodily injuries, illnesses, and infections) and how, in turn, the material conditions of the built environment have informed the construction and performance of difference since post-WWII. This urbanized landscape, developed on hillslopes and along riverbanks, speaks to broader histories of topographic segregation in Southern cities under structures of coloniality—including racism, classism, and heteropatriarchy. During my fieldwork in Brazil, I was a Fulbright-Hays fellow and visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), in the Department of History of Architecture and Urbanism, affiliated with the Laboratory of Other Urbanisms.

Multi-sited fieldwork (oral histories, self-build practices participatory observations, open-ended interviews)

Archival research

Visual methods