Reshaping the frontier landscape: Dongchuan in 18th-century Southwest China

Abstract

the history of the 1922 World Fair, its planning, built form, and aftermath. For the author, the World Fair became an opportunity to imagine the city and an ideal nation; it became a script for urban development in the modernizing country. The consolidation of Brazilian architecture and engineering was part of this same process. Indeed, the fair celebrated the neo-colonial as the true architecture of Brazil, even when many original colonial baroque structures had been recently demolished. One of the book’s most important contributions is to connect urban planning to racial ideology in thinking on the production of spatial difference and violence against the racialized other and poor. The epilogue makes that case by linking this history with the recent violence against poor racialized communities and the demolition of Vila Autodromo, the favela bulldozed to build the Olympic Village in preparation for the 2016 Summer Olympics, one of the many mega-events that Rio hosted recently. This important, carefully researched book takes on the challenge of thinking about the production of difference, exclusion, and oblivion as part of modernity. And it does it by bringing back to life those condemned by urban reforms and the imagined Brazilian community.