Who decides which stories about a city are remembered?

How do interpretations of the past shape a city’s present and future? In this book, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos discusses notions of power and national identity by examining how nation-states negotiate the preservation of urban spaces and how a city interprets, resists, and consents to the functions and meanings that it has inherited and that it reinvents for itself.

Case Study: Ouro Preto

Looking at the Brazilian city of Ouro Preto, de Souza Santos applies fine-grained ethnography and historical analysis to discuss the limits of Brazil’s imagery of social harmony and participatory democracy amid continuous inequality.