Few images are as apt as a palimpsest to convey the complex layers that make up our contemporary cities. Combining the Greekpálin(‘again’) andpsáo(‘I scrape’), palimpsests designate a manuscript in which the text of the first writing is scraped off so that the parchment or clay tablet may be written on again. They have served as a fertile metaphor to the fields of architecture, archaeology, planetary astronomy, forensic science, psychoanalysis, geology, and literary criticism, and likewise populate the imaginary of urban historians and theorists.¹ Urban spaces are like a palimpsest in a palpable, physical sense: as a...

By 1808, when the Portuguese court arrived in Rio de Janeiro after fleeing Napoleon’s troops, it was a port city of 40,000 to 50,000 inhabitants and the major trading centre of a predominantly rural country.¹ The colony’s capital since only 1763, Rio de Janeiro was unprepared to become capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves, a title obtained in 1815.² Besides the Royal family, the newly acquired status brought key changes: opening of the ports for trade with foreign markets, the establishment of Brazil’s first bank and printing press, as well as the creation of institutions...

Rio de Janeiro would reach the last decades of the nineteenth century marked by porosity. Order/disorder, colony/metropolis, centre/periphery, black/white: not much seemed to fall along the lines of a neat dichotomy. Nowhere does this seem clearer than in the formation of Brazil’s earliest urban musical genres, through processes that broke down yet another binary, popular and erudite. Quite a bit has been written about how multiracial marching bands and church-related orchestras created fecund exchanges between so-called popular and erudite music and musicians, to the point that it becomes difficult (or arbitrary) to draw a distinction.¹ Rio was already a city...

In 1890, Aluísio Azevedo published the now classicO Cortiço, a mark of naturalism in Brazilian literature.¹ The novel constitutes a microcosm of Rio de Janeiro’s society: the cast of characters includes the bourgeoisie, an ambitious vendor, exploited workers, vagabonds, and musicians. It concentrates on the portrayal of life in the precarious lodging of the title, inhabited by scores of Portuguese and Italian immigrants, mulatos, and freed-persons, often presented in the zoomorphic descriptions common to the naturalist aesthetic. In the novel’s opening sentence, Azevedo locates it in the South Zone neighbourhood of Botafogo, where João Romão becomes the owner of...

In 1930, George Gershwin introduced a book on Tin Pan Alley by stating that ‘in a word, [it] is a unique phenomenon, and there is nothing in any other country of the world to compare with it’ (Goldberg 1930: vii). The great composer and pianist, né Jacob Gershowitz, was quite correct when one considers the number of music publishers and the financial sums circulating in the Manhattan district.¹ At the same time, something comparable though less widely known could be found in Brazil’s capital, centred on the Cidade Nova’s main public square, the Praça Onze. If Tin Pan Alley represented...

After so many modernist artists and writers turned their attention to the Cidade Nova during the 1920s, the neighbourhood was no longer a central space only for marginalized social and ethnic groups. Its role in Rio de Janeiro’s lettered cartographies as a place inhabited by the poor, as we have seen, had been cemented. But in the 1930s the Praça Onze assumed a privileged role in narratives that began to define samba as a national genre, and Brazil as ‘the country of carnival’.² This was accompanied by an interconnected development, with equally nationwide implications: racial mixture, previously feared and condemned,...

What if the plans to build three vast highways crossing Manhattan in New York City in the 1960s had gone through?¹ While we may only speculate about the consequences to New York, in a sense something equivalent happened in Rio de Janeiro two decades earlier. The President Vargas Avenue tore through the heart of a Jewish neighbourhood, the former Little Africa, a Syrian stronghold, and eliminated the Praça Onze, one of the few public spaces enjoyed by residents of nearby favelas, as well as by the many Europeans, naturalized citizens, and native Brazilians who lived in its vicinity.²

Rio de...

The future envisioned with the construction of the President Vargas Avenue did not arrive, at least not according to plans. Built during the Second World War, espousing a style that could be associated to the losing side, the avenue can be ascribed to what Beatriz Jaguaribe calls modernist ruins, the ‘fracturing of a previous ethos that was never fulfilled and has already become dated’ (2001: 343). Many of the skyscrapers imagined for the area were never built. Rather than usher a new era of progress, the reforms left Rio with a thoroughfare that would be considered by a prominent architect...