Urban nature archives: rethinking extended urbanisation through sensorial methodologies

Archives are never simply records. They are dense with time—stratified, discontinuous, shot through with presence and absence. When the archive in question is a photographic and video collection made across a decade of fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon, it carries something more: the layered entanglement of urban life and nature, captured at the edges of a rapidly transforming territory, in images that refuse to settle into documentation alone.

This panel and book launch departs from exactly such an archive, assembled by Professor Roberto Monte-Mór during his research on urbanisation in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1980s and 1990s, and from the sustained inquiry that Brazilian researcher Junia Mortimer has been conducting within it. Mortimer’s practice mobilises sensorial methodologies and visual art to move through the collection’s multiple temporalities, spaces, and registers: the bodily, the ecological, the architectural, the social. The result is a way of inhabiting it, of letting its images speak across time about what extended urbanisation looks, feels, and sounds like from within.

Monte-Mór and Mortimer’s image-based book, produced from the research, will be available for purchase after the event.

Meet our speakers and chair

Roberto Monte-Mór is Professor at the Center for Development and Regional Planning and at the Graduate Center for Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. His teaching and research focus on economics and urbanism, particularly urbanization and planning theories, metropolitan and regional planning, urban and regional economics, solidarity economies, spatial organization, and development alternatives in the Amazon.

Junia Mortimer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at the School of Architecture and Design at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and associate lecturer in the Postgraduate Program in Architecture and Urban Planning and Visual Arts, both at the Federal University of Bahia. She is currently an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. Her work focuses on urban and architectural practices within photographic archives, from theoretical and historiographical perspective.

Ryan Centner is Associate Professor of Urban Geography at the London School of Economics. As a geographer and a sociologist, his field research has dealt with Latin American urban and development questions for over 20 years, especially in Argentina and Brazil. His work also engages with migration, queer experience, and spatial transformation across various other world regions, from Cascadia and the Middle East to the Pacific Islands. He recently served as photo essay editor at Contexts: Sociology for the Public, and associate editor at City & Community.

Austin Zeiderman is Professor of Geography at the London School of Economics. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the social and political dimensions of urbanization and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean.

More about this event

The Department of Geography and Environment is a centre of international academic excellence in economic, urban and development geography, environmental social science and climate change.

If you have a query, please contact us at geog.research@lse.ac.uk.

LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.