Racial Capitalism and the Urban: Racial dynamics in Brazilian cities
The second lecture in the 'Racial Capitalism and the Urban' series examines how racial classification shapes peripheral urbanisation in Brazil, with Professor Renato Emerson dos Santos.
Racial Capitalism and the Urban: Racial dynamics in Brazilian cities
Racial Capitalism and the Urban Series
City-making is a by-product of racial capitalism. Urban space has been shaped through racialised regimes of land, labour, property and governance, yet the spatial consequences of racialisation remain unevenly addressed across urban research, practice and institutional life. This series approaches the urban as a terrain where racialised processes of accumulation and dispossession take material form, and where practices of resistance, repair and alternative urban imaginaries are actively unfolding.
Racial Capitalism and the Urban is a collaboration between the UCL Urban Laboratory cross-faculty collective, UCL Social & Historical Sciences and the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Just Environments Cluster.
About the event: Racial dynamics in Brazilian cities
In this second session, Professor Renato Emerson dos Santos analyses how racial classification, hierarchisation and subalternisation produce distinct geographies in the peripheral urbanisation of capitalism, focusing on Brazil.
The lecture argues that racism shapes cities for capital – and that cities in turn reproduce racism as a condition for accumulation. Themes explored include racialised patterns of segregation and their effects on labour costs; racial stigmatisation and criminalisation as mechanisms for legitimising urban interventions; and Eurocentric ideas of culture and modernisation that devalue existing urban areas.
The lecture also addresses how the Brazilian Black movement has transformed the city into both an object and an instrument of anti-racist struggle.
This event is supported by the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences’ Global Engagement budget.
Speaker
Professor, Urban and Regional Planning Research Institute (IPPUR/UFRJ), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
Professor Renato Emerson dos Santos is a geographer and Professor at the Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He coordinates NEGRAM and serves as a Director of ANPUR (2025–2027). He was previously President of the Brazilian Geographers Association (2012–2014). His research focuses on race, territory, urban inequality, Black territorialities and social movements in Brazil, drawing on political geography and anti-racist urban thought.
Image: Photo of the Cais do Valongo in the port area of Rio de Janeiro, by Catalina Ortiz
Further information
Ticketing
Open
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes