Abstracts are listed in order of participation according to the conference schedule.
Wednesday, March 26
Goldsmith Hall, 3rd-floor Lecture Hall, School of Architecture
4:00 PM | Keynote Address: Alejandro Echeverri, “Endless Journey for an Equitable City”
The challenge to make life in our cities more vital, inclusive, and sustainable is an endless journey,
extraordinary and exciting. In our experience from the government of the city of Medellín with
the Social Urbanism strategy, we developed highly complex, comprehensive urban processes and
projects for sectors of the city with critical conditions of poverty and violence. The collaborative
work with the communities, the institutional coordination of the processes, and the power of urban
and architectural design taught us extraordinary lessons. Today from URBAM at the EAFIT University
in Medellín and from the Center for the Future of Cities at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, we have
made progress in environmental areas, climate change, data science, and trust-building
processes, to link the capacities of universities with the critical problems and territories of our
emerging realities, where people develop their collective lives.
Thursday, March 27 | 9:30 AM – 5:30 PM
Eastwoods Room, UNB 2.102, Texas Union Building
Session I – Political Ecologies and Environmental Histories
9:30–11:30 AM
This session will offer ways to move beyond the traditional confines of the city, to inquire about the extensive geographies of the urban, along with its infrastructures, environments, and political ecologies.
Seth Denizen, Washington University in Louis
Wastewater Urbanism in the Mexican Altiplano – The world’s largest and longest running wastewater agriculture system is located just outside Mexico City, in the Mezquital Valley. There, around 200,000 acres of land is irrigated with the untreated sewage of 22 million people. Every drop of rain, urban runoff, industrial effluent, and sewage in Mexico City is sent to the Mezquital Valley through a 60 kilometer pipe. The capacity of these soils to produce conditions in which agriculture can be practiced safely and produce healthy crops depends on a complex negotiation between soil chemistry, farming practices, public policy, land management, and the urban design of Mexico City’s hydraulic infrastructure. The goal of this talk is to carefully trace these connections in order to produce a thick description of how the material constraints of wastewater agriculture suggest a different kind of urban environment. I will evaluate the successes and failures of the Mezquital Valley as the world’s largest experiment fertilizing agriculture with human waste, and try to answer some simple questions: What are the conditions of possibility for its success? What are its prospects for sustainability?
Felipe Correa, Somatic Collaborative, New York, NY
Building Roads to Take the Land – This presentation explores the extensive urban transformation of the Amazon Rainforest during the second half of the twentieth century through the aggressive implementation of road infrastructure. It contextualizes the geopolitical dynamics and governmental strategies of the mid-twentieth century that catalyzed one of the most significant urbanization processes in the forest’s history. Through a selection of case studies, including the small but influential settlement of San Julian in Bolivia’s eastern plains, the presentation will show how government sponsored projects from the last 75 years raise critical questions about urban and economic development amid escalating environmental uncertainty.
Marixa Lasso, Tinker Visiting Professor (LLILAS), Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales, Panama
Landscapes and the Erasure of History: The Example of the Panama Canal – This talk examines the intimate relationship between landscape, urbanism, and history in creating an idea of the Panama Canal that disconnected it from Panama’s urban landscape and historical experience and associated it exclusively with US history and technology.
Chair: Cristina Soriano, UT Austin
11:30 AM–12:30 PM | Light Lunch
Session II – Infrastructures and Nature Flows
12:30–3:00 PM
This panel will examine how nature flows, infrastructures, and technologies affect the urban experience, reshaping how people inhabit space and interact with each other.
CJ. Alvarez, UT Austin
Environmental Amnesia and the Rio Grande – Focusing on the section of the Rio Grande that flows between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, I argue for something I call “environmental amnesia” as an interpretive framework for understanding how infrastructure projects—river engineering in particular—have impoverished our geographical imagination and our feel for the more-than-human world.
Dean Chahim, New York University
Subsiding Dreams: Mexico City’s Sewers after the Implosion of Modernism – In 1975, Mexico City’s government inaugurated the world’s largest and most complex drainage system, a network of enormous tunnels that promised to quickly evacuate the city’s sewage and stormwater, ending the perpetual specter of flooding that had long plagued the city on a lake. Moving between history and ethnography, this talk examines the long aftermath of the system’s construction and operation. It traces how the project reconfigured the basin’s hydrology and geology in ways that would ultimately come to undermine not only the system itself, but also the modernist imaginaries that animated both the project and the Mexican state itself since the mid-20th century.
Zannah Matson, University of Colorado, Boulder
Respirar el Aire de Nuevos Horizontes: Infrastructure and Peripheral Integration in 20th-Century Colombia – Focusing on a 1966 Congreso de Territorios Nacionales in Bogotá, Matson articulates how peripheral territories were constructed as potential resources for state control through settlement and agricultural programs. Analyzing speeches alongside infrastructure planning documents, she traces how the Marginal de la Selva highway is considered an infrastructure for territorial integration as well as a vector for the social integration of Indigenous populations into capitalist land development.
Hannah Meszaros Martin, University of Southern California and Plano Negativo
La Tierra Proscrita / The Outlawed Earth – Focusing on the practice of forced eradication of so-called “illicit” plant life (coca, marijuana, and poppy) with herbicides in the Colombian armed conflict, I use different visual methods, including photography, video, and participatory mapping, to document the spatial registers of this form of environmental violence. I apply an architectural lens to the analysis of the environment in the armed conflict, analyzing landscape as a living material archive that contains the traces of war and violence.
Chair: Lina Del Castillo, UT Austin
Coffee Break
Session III – Roundtable: Storytelling and Methods
3:30–5:30 PM
The participants in this roundtable will discuss how they have used non-conventional research methods, narratives, and media throughout their trajectories and how they envision using them in the future. It will be a central part of the conference, as it will illustrate how new approaches offer new research and narrative strategies to expand our understanding of the urban experience.
Javier Auyero, Urban Ethnography Lab, UT Austin
Relatos Reales of the Urban Margins – In this presentation, I reflect on ethnographic collaboration and writing in three co-authored projects—Flammable (2009), In Harm’s Way (2015), and Squatter Life 2025). How can we best conduct field research and write about urban marginality?
Barbara E. Mundy, Tulane University
Lyin’, Cheatin’, Dream Chasin’: The City View – City views are rarely truthful. Yet from the sixteenth century to the present, views of cities have had mass appeal. They have even gone viral in the platforms of their moment, be they the presses of Nuremberg to the networks of the web. In the case of Mexico City, one of the largest American cities both past and present, the appeal of city views, from a 1524 map to Thomas Kole’s 2023 digital rendering, has less to do with news or newness, and everything to do with the unsettling reality of urban change and the specter of dystopia.
Lorraine Leu, Spanish and Portuguese / LLILAS, UT Austin
Theorizing Black World-Making in Brazil and the Diaspora – How can culture register non-dominant ways of knowing and of producing space? In my view, the visual arts are currently the most dynamic cultural field in Brazil challenging Eurocolonial systems of knowledge, while simultaneously offering us ways to understand Black geographies produced through care and memory. Inspired by the installation Assentamento (Settlement) by Rosana Paulino (2013), my current book project proposes the notion of “settlement” as a way of understanding the insubordinate geographies of Black women in Brazil and in the diaspora. As the word assentar has many meanings in Portuguese, including occupying territory, making a space sacred by establishing the power of an orixá there, and establishing the foundations of a construction, I propose assentamento as a Black feminist theory-as-praxis of place. Furthermore, inspired by the meaning of assentar as “to record information,” I mobilize the concept of assentamento to think about ways of self-archiving Black lives and relationships with the land. I suggest that the idea of settlement is overdetermined by white settler colonial studies, and that focusing exclusively on settler colonialism’s violent ecologies occludes the material and notional grounds of Black refusal and resilience based on sand, mud, and water.
Hannah Meszaros Martin, University of Southern California and Plano Negativo
Plano Negativo: New Investigative Aesthetics in Latin America – Plano Negativo uses architecture, visual and spatial analysis and methods from the arts to study human rights violations and environmental conflicts from a distinctive Global South perspective. We intervene in the emergent field of multimodal visual investigations by asserting the aesthetic sensibilities and plurality of epistemological approaches from Latin America, which result from the geohistorical trajectories of state violence and the political imagination of grassroots organizations, critical thinkers, artists, and human rights activists.
Carlos Andrés Baquero-Díaz, Research Director, TERRA, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, New York University
Crossing the River: Storytelling, Sciences, and the More-Than-Human World – Crossing The River is a collaborative initiative of the MOTH Project, designed to bring the stories, ideas, and critical analyses of Indigenous leaders into academic and public conversations.
Chair: Bjørn Sletto, UT Austin
Session IV – Recentering Human and More-Than-Human Lives
9:30–11:30 AM
This session will present specific case studies that center the lives of marginalized beings and neglected aspects of urban life.
Ana María Durán Calisto, Yale University
From Marginal to Central – Lessons from Historical Ecology and Archaeology – Amazonia has been conceptualized as the periphery of the periphery, as a frontier, both by the nation-states of South America (internal colonization) as well as by external European empires before them. What historical ecologists and archaeologists are teaching us is that the heart of South America is a millenary core where complex societies arose rather than a savage land to be—ironically—civilized, pacified, assimilated, integrated, and exploited. In this lecture, I will discuss the findings that have been described for Equatorial Amazonia and what they are teaching us about early urbanisms in the region.
Guadalupe García, University of California, San Diego; Havana
The Two Franciscos: New World Ecologies and the Fracturing of Trans Imperial Geographies – Ocean currents, trade winds, and navigable distances connect the Gulf Coast of the southeastern United States to the Spanish Caribbean. The circulation of people and ideas is especially visible during exceptional times—when war, slave rebellion, or hurricanes in one colonial society affected other nearby places. But stories of more ordinary exchange between people are difficult to discern from archival fragments catalogued in boxes that correspond to various French and Spanish jurisdictions. The same factors that now conceal histories of trans imperial exchange, however, were also responsible for facilitating late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century mobilities. Reading historical records through the ecologies and built environments of colonial Havana and New Orleans, this talk will explore the ways in which Indigenous, Black, free, and enslaved geographies facilitated exchange beyond the purview of empire and the reach of colonial law.
Alex Hidalgo, Texas Christian University
Acoustic Cartographies of Urban Power – The urban grid implemented by Spanish colonists in America incorporated specific elements that contributed to the emergence of new sound technologies. The plaza—the central square that brought together the buildings of church and state as well as the residences of the most distinguished citizens—followed the routes of colonization that led to the rise of cities and towns throughout Spanish America. An analysis of Juan Gómez de Transmonte’s 1628 Forma y levantado de la Ciudad de México, the most detailed visual register of life in the former Aztec capital, helps document the aggregations of human, animal, and manufactured sounds in a given region. Reading cartographic sources for their sonic dimensions means learning to think with a historical ear, a form of critical analysis that identifies, classifies, and historicizes sounds and their meaning.
Hannah Meszaros Martin, University of Southern California / Plano Negativo
Expanding the Social World Downwards: Using Experimental Cartographies to Explore the Unseen World of Aquifers – Expanding the Social World Downwards is a multidisciplinary NSF-funded research project that studies how social imaginaries of the underground change when aquifers figure prominently in public discussions about collective living. Focusing on Costa Rica’s ongoing efforts to develop governance systems that place aquifers at the center of environmental planning, we use ethnographic and multi-modal methodologies (using GIS, images, and sound recording) to understand how, as public, and scientific discussion of aquifers increases, the relationships between life above and below ground are transformed.
Chair: Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez, UT Austin
12:00 PM | Keynote Address: Barbara Mundy, “Do Indigenous Ecologies Matter?”
The Valley of Mexico is home to one of the largest megacities in the earth. The voracious demands of urban dwellers for food, for potable water, for dry streets have long obliterated the environmental infrastructure of the Indigenous Mexica that sustained the city before 1520. Traces remain—a bridge over a dry canal; a tourist’s trajinera; a sinking foundation—and all point to loss. In light of the un-recoverability of earlier ecological arrangements, why do their histories matter? In this talk, I look back to the urban ecologies of the Mexica to argue for their ideological, if not “practical,” value.