In this guest post, Dr Junia Cambraia Mortimer describes the results of the research “Urban-Nature Archives: Spatial Practices of Futurity in Brazilian Amazonia”, funded by an International Fellowship from the Urban Studies Foundation and developed at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK), under the mentorship of Professor Dr Beth Perry.
In February 2026, I had the pleasure of participating in the podcast Urban Radar, hosted by Beth Perry, my USF Fellowship tutor and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, and Tom Goodfellow from the University of Manchester. In the episode, entitled “Seeing the City,” I was joined by Felipe Magalhães, a geographer and political economist also based at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), whose research focuses on urban spatial analysis, economic volatility, and contestations over space in Latin American cities. You can download the episode here (Urban Radar is also available on major streaming platforms).
The conversation ranged across a number of themes that are central to my USF Fellowship project, “Urban-Nature Archives.” We discussed the potentials and challenges of visual methodologies, particularly when working with photographic archives, and the ways in which the visual becomes critical to understanding massive urban transformations – especially in contexts where official planning records are absent, precarious, or actively exclusionary.
One of the threads that ran through our exchange was the question of archival absence in Brazil. More than 80% of the Brazilian built environment is conceived without architects, engineers, or urbanists, yet architectural history continues to focus on the professionally designed minority. This isn’t an oversight – it reflects systemic conditions in which modern-colonial planning has consistently rendered vernacular, spatial knowledge invisible. The precarity of archival policies in Brazil compounds this, resulting in the loss of important collections abroad, and what remains is often fragmented or inaccessible. Yet this very absence, I argued, whilst politically contested, can also be generative – it pushes us to expand our understanding of what an archive is, and where else to look for sources that official records fail to document.
The podcast also helped me articulate something I have been working through in relation to my current research on Roberto Monte-Mór’s 1980s Amazonian photographic archive. Unlike my previous work in Salvador and Belo Horizonte – where my body was present first, and archives came later to articulate what I was already sensing – with Amazonia, I face a methodological reversal. I am working with visual evidence and ethnographic accounts from a territory I have not inhabited, across a temporal distance of four decades. This is not merely a practical limitation but an epistemological challenge: it forces me to be explicit about the limits of archival work and my own positionality, and raises the question of whether counter-colonial methodology can operate across such profound spatial and temporal distances, or whether some forms of knowledge require a presence that archives – no matter how carefully approached – simply cannot substitute.
This confrontation with the archive’s limits feels like one of the most honest and productive outcomes of the Fellowship so far, and it is shaping the two main written outputs I am currently developing: a book manuscript and a journal article, both exploring Amazonian urbanization through Roberto Monte-Mór’s photographic collection and the counter-colonial methodological questions it raises. It is also pushing the research toward greater collaboration with those who hold embodied knowledge of Amazonian territories, and toward a more rigorous questioning of what it means to “see with” rather than merely to interpret.
I am grateful to the Urban Studies Foundation for making this Fellowship possible, and to Beth Perry and the Urban Institute team at the University of Sheffield for the intellectual generosity and warmth that have made this year so productive.
To know more:
https://sheffield.ac.uk/urban-institute/news/new-episode-urban-radar-podcast-available
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mXjEVoIOQRJ2GpSv08DAl