Contested Territories: The Aesthetics and Politics of Urban Design in Mexico and Brazil, 1963-88

Abstract

This dissertation studies creative cultural engagements with urban infrastructure in the wake of developmentalism in the paradigmatic contexts of Mexico and Brazil. The project introduces the built environment into current discussions in Latin American environmental humanities, shifting the discipline’s methodological vantage point from questions of representation towards material problems of design. Drawing from a broad archival corpus including architectural manifestos, underground films, public art commissions, written crónicas, and popular newspapers, the dissertation identifies key sites of friction between modernist design forms and the embodied comportments of marginalized subjects. Deploying both formal interpretations of artworks and historicist interpretations of broader urban processes, I demonstrate how artists working in various mediums challenged the standardizing (and whitening) prerogatives and extractive underpinnings of modernist design, seeking to recuperate design’s commitments to social emancipation. Responding to the designs of highway networks, drainage systems, and other infrastructural works, these artists revealed links between dominant imaginaries of social integration—mestizaje and brasilidade—and long-standing forms of spatial segregation and environmental racism, proposing novel modes of thinking about and practicing design premised on alternative understandings of social collectivity.