Porous City

“Every page bursts with insights. . . . This is a wonderfully erudite but also congenial work, inviting the reader to a deeper understanding of Rio de Janeiro’s history over the past centuries through close investigation of the neighborhood of Cidade Nova, its changing population and architecture, and the many works of literature, visual arts, and popular song connected to those histories. A groundbreaking perspective on Rio’s history.”

“This brilliant cultural history of Rio de Janeiro, while focusing on the specific neighborhood of Cidade Nova, is anything but insular in its methodology and scope. Drawing on a dazzling array of sources—urban theories, literature, painting, popular music and film, but also city plans, censuses, oral testimonies, memoirs, letters and travel accounts—Bruno Carvalho offers incisive readings of texts, including canonical ones. His argument for Rio de Janeiro as a porous city, defined by social and racial mixtures and cultural inclusions, proposes the concept of porosity over others, such as syncretism or miscegenation, the better to keep in sight ways in which those mixtures can coexist and even abet other forms of discrimination and exclusion. Lively, judicious, and erudite, Porous City makes a fundamental contribution to debates about urban modernism and cultural formations, of interest to both beginning and seasoned scholars of Brazil and Latin America. It asks a still open question, pertinent since the nineteenth century: How does a culture and self image defined by mixture coexist with stark socio-economic disparity?”

“Through what he genially calls spatial porosity, Bruno Carvalho engages a highly informed and inspiring treatment of a great city’s throbbing geology. Readers will learn much about Rio de Janeiro in its development and what a gamut of inhabitants have made of it. Porous City is a vital and lasting contribution to urban and cultural studies.”