PhD Candidate
The Architecture School at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Belo Horizonte, Brazil / 2024 - present
Historically, best practices about urban planning flow from the global North to the global South. How do these ideas travel? What happens when this trend is reversed? What can be learned in the rupture of this convention?
This PhD project applies these questions to the hyper-local scale of neighborhood corridor planning in two turn-of-the-century planned cities, Chicago, IL and Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The planning processes studied include an eTOD project in Chicago and a series of “centrality” projects in Belo Horizonte.
The project uses the “A Posteriori” method (Montero and Baiocchi, 2022), which compares findings after the research has been done. This approach focuses on urban processes rather than cities and on repeated instances rather than controlling for difference, contributing to an emerging movement in the policy mobilities field to resist the field’s traditional universalism.
Project overview [pdf]
Montero, S., & Baiocchi, G. (2022). A posteriori comparisons, repeated instances and urban policy mobilities: What ‘best practices’ leave behind. Urban Studies, 59(8), 1536-1555. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211041460