Youth, Gender, and New Formations of Collective Life in São Paulo’s Peripheries

Teresa Caldeira is professor at the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the predicaments of urbanization, such as spatial segregation, social discrimination, and uses of public space in cities of the Global South. She has analyzed the processes that generate these cities, such as peripheral urbanization and autoconstruction, highlighting their inventiveness, political cartographies, and modes of collective life. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences and the humanities. One of her current research projects is a collaboration with Gautam Bhan, Kelly Gillespie, and AbdouMaliq Simone. It focuses on four metropolises of the Global South – São Paulo, New Delhi, Johannesburg, and Jakarta – to explore the emergence of surprising new formations of collective life. Their protagonists are a new generation of urbanites who are not migrants but are city-born. Coming of age under democracy and with access to information and consumption unimaginable to previous generations, they demonstrate new and complex relationships with the city and urban citizenship. The new arrangements they create transform everyday life, urban spaces, gender relations, and urban politics of many cities across the south.