Making the Modern and Cultured City: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in São Paulo and New York (1940 - 1960)

FAIN: FT-278702-21

Marcio Siwi
Towson University (Towson, MD 21252-0001)

Writing and revising a comparison of art, architecture, and urbanism in New York City and São Paulo, 1940-1960.

My book recasts standard narratives of São Paulo and New York through an analysis of art, architecture and urbanism, arguing that North-South elites worked together (though not always agreeably) to create a shared vision of the modern and cultured city in the post-WWII period. Exploring these distinct but interrelated practices from the 1940s to the 1960s from a transnational perspective, I argue that efforts to make São Paulo and New York into regional leaders earned these cities international standing, even as it intensified patterns of uneven development, spatial segregation and racial anxiety. Popular sectors, I show, readily responded to racialized visions of the city, setting-up the stage from which different sectors of society would negotiate the shape that modernity would take.