Geografia

This paper examines the increased visibility of urban infrastructures occurring through a close coupling of information technologies and the selective integration of urban services. It asks how circulatory flow is managed in the contemporary city, by focusing on the emergence of new forms of governmentality associated with “smart” technologies. Drawing on Foucault’s governmentality, and based on a case study of Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Centre (COR), the paper argues that new understandings of the city are being developed, representing a new mode of urban infrastructure based on the partial and selective rebundling of splintered networks and fragmented urban space. The COR operates through a “un-black boxing” of urban infrastructures, where the extension of control room logics to the totality of the city points to their fragility and the continuous effort involved in their operational accomplishment. It also functions through a collapse in relations of control—of the everyday and the emergency—, which, enabled by the incorporation of the public in operational control, further raise public awareness of urban infrastructures. These characteristics point to a specific form of urban governmentality based on the operationalisation of infrastructural flows and the development of novel ways of seeing and engaging with the city.

This paper seeks to offer a new perspective on the interrelated questions of globalized capitalism and anti-Blackness. We engage with current geographical work on the question of Blackness, highlighting the ways in which prevailing forms of global capital accumulation—which take shape in numerous spatial and political practices around the world—coincide with acts of anti-Blackness. In recognizing the connections between capitalism and anti-Black violence, however, we choose not to frame anti-Blackness as an effect of capitalist relations. Rather, we insist that anti-Blackness remains a necessary precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism, as the perpetual expansion of capitalist practices requires “empty” spaces open for appropriation—a condition made possible through the modern assumption of Black a-spatiality. Drawing on theoretical discussions of both global capital and anti-Blackness, empirical examples of shifting global spatial-racial regimes, and the discursive and material practices of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, and the Afro-Brazilian community Ilha de Maré, this paper attempts to forge new geographical conversations regarding current capitalist practices and the matter of Black lives.

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing ‘the poor’ in the urban landscape. Drawing on the fields of critical cartography and digital urbanism, and taking a 2013 controversy around Google Maps’ mapping of favelas in Rio de Janeiro as a starting point, it investigates the aesthetic role of digital maps and data in the legal geographies of urban poverty. It is argued that sociospatial encodings give form to poverty in ways that activate antipoverty responses and continuously support correlations between poverty and criminality. This argument entails a post-representational approach to maps considering their inscriptional, propositional and normative functions. Cartography, statistics and law are interrogated as devices of global governance that work aesthetically to shape poverty and its modes of appearance in the city, i.e., as productive methods of documentation as well as world-making, through which geocodings simultaneously create images of poverty and become functional of spatial transformations. Poverty is thus conceptualized as it is made into an aesthetic category subjected to continuous geo-legal modulations.

This paper explores the entanglement of dreams and reality in the production of economic infrastructures. It focuses on the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which is currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil, with the aim of integrating the Amazon into global production networks. Drawing on extensive field research conducted in Ecuador, we develop a fantastical materialism, as a theoretical and methodological approach to the intertwining of fantasy and materiality through which the spaces of capital are conceived, constructed, and brought to ruin. Manta-Manaus is revealed not only as a technocratic accumulation strategy, but also as a seductive dream of planetary integration and geographical freedom. This dream has become ensnarled in the material dynamics of uneven geographical development, and its infrastructures have been repurposed for the expansion of the oil frontier. The Real of Capital thus advances through the creative destruction of its own fantasies.

Geographical scholarship has, since the late 1990s, shown how infrastructure was central to the making of urban modernity and the metabolic transformation of socio-natures. Meanwhile, the work of Latin American scholars including Aníbal Quijano and Maria Lugones has focussed attention on the imbrications between modernity and coloniality, in particular through the international racial division of labour. Moving between these ideas, I argue that there is intellectual and political ground to be gained by specifically accounting for the coloniality of infrastructure, in both its material and epistemic dimensions. I ground the analysis in the history of Recife, Northeast of Brazil, analyzing the role of British engineering in the production of the city's landscape and infrastructure, and address the epistemic dimensions of the coloniality of infrastructural by exploring infrastructural spectacle in 1920s Recife. Finally, I explore how the coloniality of infrastructure directs our attention to race, labour and finance.

This article examines the mobilisation of spatial media technologies for digitally mapping informal settlements. It argues that digital mapping operates politically through a re-configuration of circulation, power, and territorial formations. Drawing on Stuart Elden’s understanding of territory, where space is ‘rendered’ as a political category, the coming together of digital mapping and the geoweb is uncovered as a political technique re-making territory through computational logics – operating as a calculative practice that, beyond simply representing space, is productive of the political spatiality that characterises territory. The article is based on an analysis of recent attempts by ICT corporates, particularly Google, to map favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, critically examining the claim that digitally mapping informal settlements is a mechanism for socio-economic inclusion. Providing a counterargument to claims around the power of digital maps to incorporate favelas, provide recognition, legitimacy, visibility and citizenship, we discuss how in the interface between digital and urban worlds, territory as a political space is constructed through economic incorporation. In doing so, the article unpacks the spatial politics of digital and smart urbanisms and the emerging sovereignties of digital territories, particularly in the context of the tension between inclusion and exclusion experienced by those who live in informal settlements in cities in the global South.

This essay looks at the historical geography of sugar plantations in Northeast Brazil during the 16th- and 17th-centuries to critique the spatio-temporality of the discourse of the Anthropocene. I argue that sugar plantations were key places in early systemic cycles of capital accumulation with their grim calculus of cheap labor-power and acceptable deaths. Sugar plantations were simultaneously prototypical racializing state actors and part of the emergent relations of capital changing the climate. With their rationalized, time-disciplined labor for processing cane into sugar, plantations were not only fundamentally proto-industrial sites, but also one of capital’s laboratories of modernity. They were primordial sites of proletarianization, of spatio-temporal patterns that repopulated the Americas and central in the production not of the Anthropocene but of the racializing Capitalocene.

This article focuses on the struggle of a group of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – displaced in the run up to the 2014 World Cup – to claim back their traditionally occupied workspace. Their displacement dramatically ruptured their pursuit of dignified livelihoods in the city’s informal economy. Using prolonged ethnography between 2014 and 2016, I describe how the workers engaged with an affective governance regime in which narrow avenues of negotiation are opened but promises are never kept, generating a constant state of unpredictability and possibility. This cycle of hope and frustration demobilises their resistance movement while their charismatic leader struggles to produce and maintain the hope that they might achieve relocation. This labour of hope keeps their association alive but also generates frustration and further demobilisation. The article foregrounds the ambiguous role played by hope in the life of political movements and their everyday relationships with states.

This paper addresses the engagement of critical geographers from Northeastern Brazil with regional planning, aiming at transforming society by acting on their region’s spaces. Extending and putting in relation literature on planning theory in the Global South and geographical scholarship on decoloniality, I explore new archives showing how the planning work that these geographers performed from 1957 to 1964 was an example of the ‘South’ re-elaborating and putting into practice notions arising from ‘international’ literature, such as that of ‘active geography’, and pioneering critical uses of instruments, such as mappings and statistics, that have often been associated with technocracy and political conservatism. Connected with peasants’ struggles and with a theoretical framework that is cognisant of the colonial histories and insurgent Black and indigenous traditions in the Northeast, these geographers’ works show that there is no ‘Southern Theory’ without a concrete engagement of scholars with social and political problems, one which is not limited to ‘participation’, but aims at challenging the political powers in place. Although not devoid of contradictions that are analysed here, the experiences of these Southern geographers acting in and for the South can provide precious insights into current (Northern or Southern) scholarly programmes aimed at resisting oppression.

This paper analyzes the intersection between waste, value, and the right to the city within the context of the Municipal Recycling Collection Program in Salvador, Brazil. It shows how the legal recognition of recyclable-waste collectors as legitimate workers and their integration into municipal practices of waste management has not materialized into improved working conditions and has done nothing to advance their struggle for the right to the city. A critical value perspective on this specific case demonstrates that waste and “humans-as-waste” “switching” from not-value to value-in-the-making does not represent a way of escaping abjection and exploitation. Instead, the inclusion of cooperative collectors into the municipal recycling collection program has resulted in new forms of dispossession, through state-increased control over recyclables and in the municipality appropriating the value produced by the struggles, knowledge, and informal collective labor of the collectors. The right to the city for waste workers in Salvador therefore entails the right to work with dignity and the re-appropriation of waste as the urban commons to create livelihoods based on labor relations and regimes of value against and beyond capitalism.