City and Regional Planning
Teresa Caldeira’s research focuses on predicaments of contemporary urban development and patterns of spatial segregation and social discrimination. She has been studying relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratization and neoliberalization in cities of the global south. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences, and especially concerned with reshaping ethnographic methods for the study of cities.
Teresa Caldeira’s book
City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (University of California Press, 2000), won the Senior Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society in 2001. It analyzes the way in which crime, fear of violence, and disrespect of citizenship rights intertwine with urban transformations to produce a new pattern of urban segregation in a context of democratic consolidation. Focusing on São Paulo and using comparative data on Los Angeles,
City of Walls suggests that the new pattern of urban segregation developing in these cities also appears in many metropolises around the world. This pattern is based on the construction of fortified enclaves and exemplifies the emergence of a new model of organizing social differences in urban space.
Teresa Caldeira’s two current research projects seek to investigate new formations of urban life and city space as they intersect with new technologies of the public, new forms of governance, and new paradigms of urban planning. The first project, in collaboration with James Holston, examines a shift in the paradigm of urban planning in Brazil by focusing on recent urban policy and legislation and comparing them to the previous model of modernist-developmentalist planning. The second project is entitled “Youth, Gender, and New Technologies of the Public in the Neoliberal City.” It analyzes cultural and artistic movements such as hip-hop as a way of addressing the engagement of youth groups with the city as a central experience of social inequality and the use of its different spatial formations as the imaginary through which inequality and racism are criticized.
SPECIALIZATIONS
Comparative urban studies, social theory, ethnography and qualitative methodology.
EDUCATION
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
M.A. Political Science, University of São Paulo
B.A. Social Sciences, University of São Paulo
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo Berkeley: University of California Press (2000).
"I came to sabotage your reasoning!": Violence and Resignifications of Justice in Brazil. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, editors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 102-149. (2006).
State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions, with James Holston. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, editors. London: Blackwell. Pp. 393-416. (2005).
The Making and Unmaking of Democratic Spaces. In The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about "Things in the Making," Joan Ockman, editor. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 224-233. (2000).
Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation. Public Culture 8(2): 303-328. (1996).
