Lecture Series: Organizing Architectures: Coloniality

#2 of the Organizing Architectures Lecture Series on “Coloniality”

The Favela as Figure: Colonialist Afterlives and Urbanism’s Technocratic Aesthetics in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

Lecture by Prof. Dr. Adrian Anagnost, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts New Orleans

How did the visual and spatial logics of colonial Brazil persist within modern technocratic urbanism? Focusing on Rio de Janeiro’s early-20th-century urban reforms and architectural debates,  the favela emerged as a figure through which elites translated colonial hierarchies of order and disorder into modernist form. Rather than a break with colonialism, Brazil’s technocratic urbanism recoded the spatial logics of the casa-grande and plantation – hierarchical, paternalist, and racialized – into the visual grammar of modernization. The favela thus became both the symptom and the aesthetic kernel of modern Brazilian urbanism: a site where social inequality was reimagined as a design problem.

The lecture will be held in English.

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Termin

Mittwoch, 10.12.2025, 19:00 - 20:30 Uhr

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Veranstaltungsort

DAM Auditorium
Schaumainkai 43
60596 Frank­furt am Main