Nate Millington (Geography, Manchester): Infrastructural repurposing and repair in São Paulo, Brazil
| Dates: | 26 February 2025 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 18:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Nate Millington |
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Part of the University of Manchester's Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies' research seminar series:
Wed 26 February 2025, 5pm (UK time). This event will be in person, in Samuel Alexander Building, room A214. It can be followed online here: https://zoom.us/j/95860231166
Abstract: In this presentation, I analyse the politics of repairing and retrofitting vacant buildings in São Paulo, Brazil, to consider how differently positioned actors in the city are repurposing urban space in line with differing visions of the urban future. Actors range from private developers promoting economic revitalization through the logic of retrofit, housing movements occupying vacant buildings for the purposes of informal and formal social housing, and a network of “technical assistants” who offer training in infrastructural repair in occupied/squatted buildings. Ongoing interventions in the urban centre are understood through the conceptual lens of repair, a term which has a double significance in this project. It refers, first, to ongoing practices of fixing and maintaining that keep structures and infrastructures—both social and material—running. Second, and in a more politicized vein, it refers to reparative projects that are responsive to centuries of racialized dispossession, linking the concept of repair-as-fixing and maintaining to the project of reparations. In this paper, I consider these practices as examples of the complexities and cleavages of reparative practice in contemporary cities, and as indicative of different logics of repair that presently circulate in the city. This paper contributes to ongoing debates about the politics of repair and the possibilities of “reparative infrastructures” in cities of the South.
Nate Millington is Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies in the Geography Department and the Manchester Urban Institute at the University of Manchester.
Speaker
Nate Millington
Role: Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies, Geography Department
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A214
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
