Embodying the Periphery is an interdisciplinary publication sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiatives at the University of California Berkeley.

This book combines approaches from the design disciplines, humanities, and social sciences to foster interdisciplinary engagement across geographies around the identities embodied in and of peripheries. Peripheral communities bear human faces and names, necessitating specific modes of inquiry and commitments that prioritize lived human experience and cultural expression. Hence, the peripheries of this book are a question, not a given, the answers to which are contingent forms assembled around embodied identities. Peripheries are urban fringes, periphery countries in the modern world-system, Indigenous lands, occupied territories, or the peripheries of authoritative knowledge, among others.

The Self-Built City charts the material and ecological history of self-built settlements in São Paulo, one of the primary megacities in the global South, where one-third of the citizens live in conditions that challenge or reproduce systems of oppression in place since the turn of the late 19th century. I study camps, favelas, mutirões (collective self-built housing), hillslopes, and riverbanks at the feet of the Serra da Cantareira mountain range on the northern edge of São Paulo as they have been constructed under the Brazilian dictatorship (1964–1985) and democracy (since 1985). By analyzing the material politics of occupations, squatting, camping, self-building, hijacking, I argue that the construction of difference in the self-built city is enacted through environment and knowledge ecologies that are intersectional.

Whereas these studies have highlighted the urban formation of self-built settlements, this project examines more-than-urban ecologies shaping the urbanization in the foothills of the Serra, where hydrography, terrain, and topography become political agents in the settlements' urbanization. The interplay between humans, land, dwellings, and the materiality of rivers and hills has borne repercussions for political identities and governmental techniques that construct specific human-environment relationships. Imbued with heroic attempts, dispossession injuries, lost expectations, and dreams for the future, this history draws on three years of archival research in almost completely untapped repositories in the northern peripheries of São Paulo, visual analyses of historical maps and architectural drawings, and multi-site ethnographic fieldwork.

Ultimately, through the material and ecological history of the self-built city this project documents a central tenet of Brazilian urban modernity: the attempt to overcome “nature” while securing the privileges of the few through racist, heteropatriarchal, and ecocidal forms of oppression. Planning policies and architectural projects have been central to maintaining or challenging such privileges—from the will to sanitize the poor through their dwellings ('50s and '60s), to empowering them via collective housing cooperatives ('80s), and to involving them in participatory planning processes that risk reproducing the very inequality they aim to overcome (the present).