UC Berkeley

Read through its most visible characteristics, the neighborhood in the morro (hill) can be anywhere in the peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, and cities of the global South. Its specificities might disappear within general frameworks used to study urban peripheries, including center-periphery dichotomies, informal urbanism, and the essentialized identity of the poor. This portrait, instead, is about the neighborhood as a landscape of multiple histories, where heterogeneity and difference have produced specific spaces and rhythms. This ethnographic approach provides a deeper understanding of emergent forms of the periphery assembled around certain visibilities, practices, and identities, and engaged in uneven patterns of democratic city-making.