In this guest post, Dr Junia Mortimer reflects on the ‘Urban-Nature Archives’ strand of the exhibition ‘Urban Dreams, Future Cities’, hosted at The Wave, University of Sheffield, in May and June 2026, co-curated with Prof Beth Perry and Dr Olivia Casagrande. As a USF International Fellow, Dr Mortimer spent nine months at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (UK), under the mentorship of Prof Beth Perry and Prof AbdouMaliq Simone.
A few boxes of slides. Field notebooks thick with schematic maps, population statistics, and the names of key informants. Almost forty years ago, in Machadinho d’Oeste and other frontier settlements of Rondônia, Brazil, Roberto Monte-Mór (architect, urban planner, and economist) photographed a region being remade by colonisation, deforestation, and a malaria epidemic that, in 1986, reached nine in every ten settlers. He was not trying to make art. He was documenting transmission rates, settlement patterns, and land-use systems, working alongside a CEDEPLAR/UFMG team testing blood for a state health campaign. The campaign was so controversial that one frontier community accused the researchers of collecting blood as a sign of the apocalypse. The camera was instrumental, peripheral to his identity as an economist and planner. It is precisely this peripherality, we have come to think, that makes the archive so valuable: unconcerned with aesthetic standards, the photographs recorded what a more deliberate eye might have discarded.
Monte-Mór’s fieldwork became the empirical ground for one of Brazilian urban theory’s most influential ideas: extended urbanisation. Developed under Edward Soja at UCLA and building on Henri Lefebvre, it describes how industrial-capitalist social relations penetrate territories far beyond the city’s edge, through roads, state services, land titling, and biomedical surveillance. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid subsequently developed a related theory of ‘planetary urbanisation’, independently drawing on Lefebvre’s work while acknowledging Monte-Mór’s pioneering contribution to the concept of extended urbanisation. For forty years, that has been the accepted reading of these images: modernity arriving in the jungle, the highway, the migratory flow, the clearing.
Urban-Nature Archives, the strand of the exhibition Urban Dreams, Future Cities that I co-curated with Beth Perry and Olivia Casagrande, with Roberto’s photographs at its centre, proposes a second reading. It is less a correction of the first than a multiplication of what the archive can show.
Seeing with, rather than looking at
In 2024 I began sitting down with Roberto in his flat in Belo Horizonte, projecting his slides and looking at them together, again and again, in the company of others whose expertise had nothing to do with his original brief. Harley Silva brought Amazonian economic history. Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá, an Indigenous photographer and videomaker from Xakriabá territory, brought a way of tracing how construction knowledge moves between peoples. Wellington Cançado, an architect, brought the idea of forests as buildable at scales urban theory rarely credits. Mariana Modesto brought the patience of cataloguing. I brought questions about architecture as cultural practice. Roberto brought the photographs, and his willingness to see them differently.
We called this practice ‘seeing with’, drawing both on John Berger’s insistence that seeing is a social construction and on Fred Moten’s caution against ‘looking at’, which tends to split visual experience cleanly into subject and object. Seeing with is not an individual act of interpretation. It is a collective, ongoing negotiation of what an image is permitted to mean, carried out by people whose frameworks collide with each other and with the picture. At one session, Roberto grew quiet, then said: ‘In the 1980s, I was so focused on documenting the transformation (the roads, the land division, the urbanisation process) that I didn’t see… or I saw but didn’t think it was significant… all of this.’
‘All of this’ turned out to be everywhere in the archive, once we knew to look. A woman steers a canoe on the Machadinho River with an infant settled among the supplies. Her ease suggests not desperation but expertise: knowledge of currents, of safe crossings, and of seasonal water levels that no road-building engineer possessed. Two washerwomen bend over a wooden platform extending into the Jamari River, palm thatch framing the scene; the structure itself is a precise reading of seasonal water levels. A palm-thatched house on stilts in Ji-Paraná stands beside a parked Volkswagen bus. Traditional construction and industrial modernity share the same frame, and neither is more ‘modern’ than the other: the bus will rust and fail within decades, while the palm roof can be rebuilt indefinitely from local, replaceable materials. Three settlers pose with quiet dignity beneath an elaborately thatched roof whose construction shows, as Roberto and I put it in the text we have co-written, ‘understanding and sophistication, not merely improvisation’.
Roberto has recently proposed a name for what these images document once we stop reading them only as evidence of arrival: extended naturalisation. Extended urbanisation described industrial logic penetrating the frontier. Extended naturalisation describes the inverse and simultaneous process: the persistence of ecological knowledge, river-based mobility, and non-industrial building practice within, and against, that same urbanisation. Rivers remain infrastructure. Canoes remain vehicles. Palm thatch remains a technology, not a relic. The frontier was never simply where modernity arrived; it was also where several temporalities continued to coexist, sometimes colliding, sometimes combining.
From the archive to the wall
What does this theoretical reversal look like when it leaves the seminar room and enters an atrium? At Urban Dreams, Future Cities, staged at The Wave in May and June 2026, Roberto’s photographs were not hung conventionally. They were propped on a run of mismatched, paint-worn wooden stepladders, domestic and faintly precarious objects, running the length of the foyer. Visitors approached a wall of images showing a rising tide of human- and machine-made forms encroaching on the landscape: the highway, the migratory flow, the clearing. Seen from a distance, the installation stays close to what Roberto’s original framework asked him to see.
Only on closer approach does the interior of the display reveal something else. This is where my own collages entered the work. Parts of certain photographs are lifted into relief, small squares and fragments of paper raised from the surface, catching light and shadow that the flat image around them cannot. The photograph becomes an object. It gains depth and refuses to lie flat. Against the speed at which images are now consumed, the cut produces friction. That friction holds the eye long enough for these dwellings to come forward as what they actually were: spatial intelligences that knew exactly where they were. They appear not as ruins but as futurities, forms of inhabiting the threshold where the urban and the natural were never opposed to begin with.
The collages are, in that sense, a visual translation of ‘seeing with’. The research method disrupted a single authoritative reading of the photograph through collaborative viewing. The collage disrupts the single authoritative surface of the photograph itself, forcing a second, slower look at the constructions that extended-urbanisation theory once rendered as merely provisional or precarious.
What did you dream?
Ahead of the opening, I ran a public workshop at the University of Sheffield’s Geography and Planning building with Katy Quintulem, an artist with the EPEW collective of Mapuche makers, whose own strand of the exhibition, Fillke Pewma, filled the atrium with a woven, thread-built pavilion. Twenty participants worked directly with reproductions of Roberto’s photographs, using collage and cyanotype printing to build their own images. The workshop opened not with a lecture but with a sharing of dreams about urban futures. The technique was the same as the banner printed in cyanotype blue and asked, in Mapudungun, Spanish, and English, ‘chem pewmaymi / ¿Qué soñaste? / What did you dream?’ that hung inside the woven pavilion beside Roberto’s ladders of photographs, one strand of the exhibition speaking directly to the other, through the workshop.
It mattered that this practice was not only mine, or only Roberto’s, or only academic. The workshop extended ‘seeing with’ to people who had no prior relationship to Machadinho d’Oeste, Xakriabá territory or the Andes. Each was asked to bring an image or object of their own urban imagination, then to cut, layer, and reprint it alongside a forty-year-old slide of a frontier none of them had lived through. It was extended naturalisation, tested outside the seminar room.
The exhibition was the centre of a week in which the archive travelled. Roberto came from Belo Horizonte, and together we presented the work for the first time in Zurich, then at the London School of Economics, alongside a keynote lecture by Roberto in Sheffield and an Urban Radar podcast conversation. At each stop we launched Arquivo Urbano Natureza, the bilingual photobook we made from the archive, so that the images could keep circulating after the ladders were packed away.
Futurities, not ruins
The devastation documented in these photographs is real: the deforestation, the malaria, the displacement of traditional populations, the violence of colonisation. None of that is undone by changing how we look. But recognising the sophistication of the washing platform, the raised floor, and the palm roof makes an argument. Other relationships between human dwelling and ecological systems are not only imaginable; they have been, all along, technically sophisticated, actively practised, and necessary. They exist not despite industrial urbanism but in the gaps it left unexamined.
Roberto’s slides still sit in their boxes, waiting, as they have for decades, for another generation of researchers, another set of questions, another way of seeing. What they show has always depended less on the photographer’s original intention than on who is willing to sit down, project the image, and look, together, closely and patiently enough that a form of inhabitation dismissed as precariousness might come forward instead as intelligence. The next step, we hope, is to take the images back to the places they show and to see them with the people who live there.
To find out more
Mortimer, J. C. (2026) Seeing with, seeing otherwise: Transvisualizing extended urbanization through urban-nature archives in Brazilian Amazonia. Urban Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980261444233
Mortimer, J. C. and Monte-Mór, R. L. (2025) Arquivo Urbano Natureza / Urban-Nature Archives. Belo Horizonte: Cosmópolis/UFMG.
Urban Radar podcast: ‘Seeing the City’ (https://www.buzzsprout.com/2451716/episodes/18601066) and ‘RIVER/CITY’ (https://www.buzzsprout.com/2451716/episodes/19301066).
This work was supported by an International Fellowship grant awarded by the Urban Studies Foundation, grant reference USF-INT-241008. Thanks to Beth Perry, AbdouMaliq Simone, Olivia Casagrande, and the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield; to Al Mathers, my co-curator Urban Archives in the exhibition Urban Dreams, Future Cities, curated by Beth Perry, Olivia Casagrande, and me; to Katy Quintulem and the EPEW collective; and to Roberto Monte-Mór, Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá, Harley Silva, Wellington Cançado, and Mariana Modesto.