Urban Space and National Identity in Early Twentieth Century São Paulo, Brazil

This book focuses on how the political, cultural, and technical networks within the field of engineering provided the space within which an important professional middle class prospered in the city of São Paulo and made lasting contributions to the development of modern Brazil.

CRISTINA PEIXOTO-MEHRTENS is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, USA.

"In "Urban Space and National Identity in Early Twentieth Century Sao Paulo, Brazil," ""Cristina Peixoto-Mehrtens--historian, architect, and former urban planner--has written a vital book. She details the complex interactions among policy makers, bureaucrats, politicians, and scholars who defined the economic, cultural, social, and political 'spaces' of urban Sao Paulo, Brazil's twentieth-century economic power house. Deftly exploring the labyrinths of state and private development agencies and drawing on an eclectic array of sources, Peixoto-Mehrtens offers fresh insight into Brazil's economic and social modernization in the twentieth century. Her tale of the construction of the Pacaembu Stadium during the late 1930s is a model microhistory of tangled social and political agendas. At the same time, she offers a new chapter in the deepening account of the role Brazil's middle class played in articulating modernity to a nation that in the early twenty-first century has become a rising global power. Recognizing that there was no unified middle-class political initiative, she penetratingly shows how bureaucrats and policy makers, acting from local conditions, interpreted and transformed the transnational traffic in theories of development and urban planning."--Brian P. Owensby, Professor and Chair, Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia
"How did middle-class architects and city planners, municipal employees and foreign-owned companies, politicians and intellectuals all contribute to reshaping the urban spaces in Sao Paulo, South America's largest city, in the 1930s and 40s? "Urban Space and National Identity in Early Twentieth Century Sao Paulo, Brazil" offers a fresh interpretation of the crucial role that middle sectors played in influencing urban life in a vital center of modernizing Brazil. Through the creative use of a wide array of archives, oral histories, and varied sources, this social and cultural history""artfully analyzes the comple