Spatial Projects of Forgetting

Chapter 2, “Spatial Projects of Forgetting,” excavates three sites demolished in the Liberdade and Bela Vista neighborhoods as part of mid-twentieth-century urban redevelopment in São Paulo. This excavation reveals how the authors of the seminal redevelopment project, the Avenues Plan, razed and remade local spaces with deep ties to formal slavery, racial violence, the abolitionist campaign, and Black self-determination, along with high concentrations of African-descendent populations. Through what this chapter terms spatial projects of forgetting, official city planners endeavored to render African descendants an invisible element of the city’s past, meanwhile reproducing the metropolis in a whitened image of modern progress.