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Postcards from Rio examines the complex interconnections between notions of citizenship and space in the works of photographers and video makers. It dialogues with a large body of scholarship on Rio de Janeiro and its favelas in particular. Only that, in this case, the point of departure is a cultural production that, coming from the peripheries, reconfigures dominant images of the favelas, their residents, and the city itself. These new mediators are mostly young people of the favelas, whose daily practices are used as the lens through which they contest stigmatized images of favelas. This cultural production lays the foundation for an aesthetic of representation involved in the appropriation and rewriting of the city as part of a process of political resistance and affirmation of difference. The book also discusses the centrality of favelas in the marketing and branding of the city as a strategy to attract external investors and tourists. The cultural productions analysed here discuss the impacts and priorities of the urban interventions on the sphere of the individual and the collectively. They also denounce the key role played by race in a logic characterized by models of exclusion and discrimination that structure the social and spatial organization of the city. The city then emerges as political space where a multiplicity of interests and urban policies are intertwined with demands for more inclusive forms of governance—certainly a form of citizenship that promotes inclusion, nondiscrimination, equal treatment, and the right to have a say over the city’s future.

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.