Research Expertise and Interest

urbanization in the global south, peripheries; urban violence; spatial segregation, urban change, ethnography and qualitative methods

Research Description

Teresa Caldeira is a scholar of cities, their political practices and formations of collective life. Her research focuses on predicaments of urbanization and reconfigurations of spatial segregation and social discrimination, mostly in cities of the global south. Her current research investigates new formations of collective life especially in the peripheries of these cities. She has been interested in studying the relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratization. She has also investigated the ways in which fear of violence and disrespect of citizenship rights intertwine with urban transformations to produce a pattern of urban segregation based on fortified enclaves. She has always worked in an interdisciplinary manner, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences, and have been exploring how to reshape ethnographic methods for the study of cities.

Teresa Caldeira’s book City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (University of California Press, 2000), won the Senior Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society in 2001 and has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish. The book presents a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which crime, fear of violence, and disrespect of citizenship rights intertwine with urban transformations to produce a new pattern of urban segregation based on fortified enclaves. Focusing on São Paulo and using comparative data on Los Angeles, City of Walls suggests that the new pattern of urban segregation developing in these cities also appears in many metropolises around the world.  It proposes that the built environment may be the arena in which the contestation of democratization, social equalization, and expansion of citizenship rights is materially embodied in contemporary societies.

For more on her research and publications, see: www.teresacaldeira.com