Professor Teresa Caldeira talks Latin American cities on student-run podcast

Tune into the latest episode of Sur-Urbano — a podcast about Latin American cities — for a fascinating discussion with CED Professor of City & Regional Planning Teresa Caldeira. She joins podcast hosts, Department of City & Regional Planning Ph.D. students Isabel Peñaranda and Giselle Mendonca, to discuss her two most recent articles, “Transitoriness: Emergent Time/Space Formations of Urban Collective Life” and “Transversal Connections: Seeing Cities from Other Spaces.”

Hear about Caldeira’s trajectory as an urban anthropologist in the 1970s in favelas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and her recent work exploring the twin concepts of “transversality” and “transitoriness.” Departing from the midcentury belief in progress implicit in autoconstruction—the phenomenon of the poor and working-class building their own houses in the peripheries of Brazil's metropolitan centers — Caldeira describes the transitory, fragmented, and nonlinear dynamics that characterize cities today. As in so much of her work, she critically reflects on the categories we use and pushes us to think transversally with concepts that “travel” in unexpected ways.