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Book Chapter

Walling the peripheries: porous condominiums at Brazil’s urban margins

  • Matthew Richmond
  • Moisés Kopper

This chapter discusses a widespread but underexplored phenomenon in Brazilian cities: the growing presence of walls and other security infrastructures in low-income, peripheral neighborhoods. This practice can often take the form of bounded and internally regulated regimes of residential organization at a hyper-local scale, associated with the emic term condomínio (condominium). The authors propose the concept of “walling” to theorize the practices of socio-material assembly through which peripheral condominiums emerge, driven by the efforts of urban subjects to reconstruct a sense of well-being within environments experienced as precarious and insecure. While walling can significantly reshape socio-spatial relationships and everyday flows of bodies, the authors argue that broader social conditions and relationships in peripheries tend to promote forms of spatial and temporal porosity that weaken or even undermine these regimes of self-segregation. The chapter explores varying dynamics of peripheral condominiums through the presentation of contrasting case studies from three different Brazilian cities: a recently completed Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House My Life) public housing project in Porto Alegre; a partially walled and symbolically partitioned favela in Rio de Janeiro; and an occupied and subsequently formalized public housing project in São Paulo.

  • Keywords:
  • walling,
  • peripheries,
  • infrastructures,
  • condominiums,
  • Brazil,
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Matthew Richmond

LSE, London School of Economics, United Kingdom - ORCID: 0000-0002-1563-3615

Moisés Kopper

Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium - ORCID: 0000-0003-0327-7681

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  • Publication Year: 2022
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  • Publication Year: 2022

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Walling the peripheries: porous condominiums at Brazil’s urban margins

Authors

Matthew Richmond, Moisés Kopper

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-661-2.04

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Embodying Peripheries

Editors

Giuseppina Forte, Kuan Hwa

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

304

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-661-2

ISBN Print

978-88-5518-660-5

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-5518-661-2

eISBN (xml)

978-88-5518-662-9

Series Title

Ricerche. Architettura, Pianificazione, Paesaggio, Design

Series ISSN

2975-0342

Series E-ISSN

2975-0350

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