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Teresa Caldeira
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Teresa Caldeira

1954

Brazilian anthropologist who explained how fear builds the city: walls, fortified enclaves and a democracy that expanded the vote without guaranteeing life.

Born in São Paulo in 1954 and professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, Caldeira studied during Brazil's democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s how violence and fear reorganised her city. City of Walls (2000) is the result: the talk of crime, everyday conversations about robberies, turns the poor, Black people and migrants into threats, and fortified enclaves, gated developments, guarded towers and shopping centres, turn their backs on the street and manufacture a new segregation.

Her most uncomfortable finding is the democratic paradox: the walls grew precisely as political rights expanded, because civil rights, bodily integrity and justice, remained denied to the poor, and the elites responded to equality by withdrawing. With James Holston she formulated the idea of disjunctive democracy and studied the self-built peripheries of São Paulo.

Since 2010 she has turned to what she calls peripheral urbanization: residents of the edges produce city and citizenship by their own rules and rhythms, and their cultural practices, hip hop, graffiti and pichação, claim presence in a city that excludes them. Her work has travelled to studies of gated enclaves around the world, from Mexico City to Johannesburg, and is the reference for understanding how private security produces the unequal city.

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