Fachadas pintadas, janelas quebradas:

“Painted Façades, Broken Windows” is an excerpt from my 2017 doctoral thesis in Urban and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The text utilizes vocabularies of performance studies, urban planning, and urban anthropology to present different manifestations of urban art in Rio de Janeiro, creating a “dream methodology” to examine shared experiences of and visions for city streets. Additionally, the work investigates the absent bodies that haunt cityscapes, especially bodies that have been rendered absent by physical or economic violence (such as police brutality, on the one hand, and gentrification, on the other). As such, urban ghosts and the “counter-memories”, they carry haunt the research from its beginning, both in examining the interpersonal, street level effects of major urban changes and in prompting reflections on the relationship between collective memory and individual identity. In the work, I seek to approximate the heteroglossic experiences of bodies meeting in the city through textual and thematic juxtapositions. As such, I have departed from standard academic writing and approached the work as a performance text, utilizing protest chants, popular songs, and personal narratives – as well as citations from theoretical essays and newspaper articles – in order to investigate relations between memory, territory, and corporeality.Key-Words: Urban aesthetics. Mega-events. Counter-memory. Gentrification. Rio de Janeiro.