Pawned spaces, crime and militarized management of the urban frontier: new contents of the peripheral urban sprawl of São Paulo
Funding period: 25 January 2023 – 25 July 2023
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
César Simoni Santos is a Geographer and Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of São Paulo (USP). There, he is accredited to the Graduate Program in Human Geography (PPGH) and linked to the Urban Geography Lab (Labur). Simoni Santos is also part of the Critical Urban Theory Group at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) at the USP and the Critical Urban Geography Group (GESP) in Brazil.
As a USF International Fellow, César will spend six months working at the University of Toronto, Canada, under the mentorship of Professor Alan Walks.
César has been working with the theme of the mobile frontier as a dimension of the dynamic morphology that characterizes the territorial formation of the new world with very marked nuances for the Brazilian case. In this field, he is author of the book The Urban Frontier: Urbanization, Industrialization and Real Estate Market in Brazil (original title in Portuguese – 2015) and articles and book chapters on the same subject (such as “The geophagic nature of financial dominance in the Brazilian real state market”, in Die Erde, Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin, and “From a Place of Business to the City as a Business”, in the book The city as a commodity).
César has also worked in the field of theory and method in geography, and among his most recent works are the co-edition of the book Critical Urban Geography: theory and method (original title in Portuguese – 2018), the book chapter entitled “Henri Lefebvre and the morphology of a spatial dialectic” (in the book The new urban condition: criticism and theory from architecture and urbanism, 2021) and the article “Towards a spatialized utopia: romanticism and everyday life in the Marxism of Henri Lefebvre”.
Currently, César has been researching the role of the indebtedness of the poorest families and illegal businesses in the advancement of the built environment in the peripheral areas of the metropolis of São Paulo.