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Led by historian Eduarda Araújo, Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, this project aims to connect spatial disputes, urban renewals, and urban imaginations of the past and present through maps, illustrations, newspapers and video interviews.
By 1850, the transatlantic slave trade had turned the port city Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, into the largest African urban center in the Americas, and a core part of the slave regime in the Americas. The majority of Africans and Afro-Brazilians who lived in Rio played a critical role in shaping cultural, legal, geographic, and political disputes that drew the contours of freedom and citizenship in modern Brazil.
However, the document considered to be the city’s first urban renewal blueprint, written in 1843 by military engineer Henrique Rohan de Beaurepaire, portrays the Rio de Janeiro of 1843 as though it were void of the then-illegal slave trade, racial violence, and the enslaved labor that built and sustained Brazil economically and politically. The African and Afro-Brazilian workers who occupied, transformed, and appropriated the city’s streets do not figure in any of the pages of Beaurepaire’s urban renewal plans. Through technical language, numbers, budgets, health-related concerns, the Beaurepaire report attempts to neutralize spatial disputes that took place at the time, and normalize the exploitation of enslaved labor.
In this visual narrative, we will critically analyze the 1843 Beaurepaire urban plan, picking it apart to expose the fundamentally racial character of its militarized logic and imagination of an urban future. What might Beaurepaire have unintendedly revealed about mid-nineteenth-century Rio, after all? Reading this document against the grain, we will try to listen to the sounds and imagine the contours of a city that indigenous peoples, Africans, and their descendants built.
This project finally seeks to complicate the ways we narrate urban histories in the Americas.