To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space--drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture--and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas. To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, we have the responsibility of looking at the built environment of the Americas through our own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

What is the real purpoise of this huge apparatus of higher education in architecture?
This book proposes to discuss exactly this question. Departing from our assumption that architectural education has not changed much in the last 50 years, how do we define the relationship between education and practice in our countries nowadays? Of course one should feel free to disagree with us and defend the idea that architectural
education has indeed changed. In this case, has it changed as much as the profession?
In summary we want to ask if academics actually increase the base of professional knowledge or if we rather create another sort of knowledge, apart - at least partially - from the professional practice.
And we hope that this book will give us, and our students a broad perspective on architectural education in the Western hemisphere today, allowing us to discuss in which direction it must evolve and
where should we concentrate our efforts for change.

Fernando Luiz Lara investigates how and why modern architecture became so popular in his native country, tracking the path of the dissemination as well as the economic, cultural, and political conditions that made it possible. He views it as a direct extension of the optimism and relative stability that spread throughout the country beginning in the 1950s.

The projects here presented were developed by a partnership between UT Austin and UANL-Monterrey schools of architecture, led by Professors Fernando Lara and Diana Maldonado. They students focused on designing the necessary infrastructure to allow people to cross freely between Mexico and the US. The synthesis that we developed demonstrate that the border system operates under three major industries: 1) the globalization industry which moves $500 Billion in goods between U.S. and Mexico every year; 2) the labor industry which employees millions of Hispanic workers in the U.S.; and 3) the military industry which sells the idea that the border is dysfunctional so that both governments can justify spending billions on militarization. Together, these industries are responsible for an unreasonable amount of oversight (some say harassment) of millions of people who need or want to cross the border for their livelihood, yet they have not been successful in controlling the flow of drugs northbound or weapons southbound.

In order to counter the effects of militarization and improve the lives of those that use the border frequently we propose that: 1) solutions have to be localized, what works for Tijuana / San Diego might not work for Juarez / El Paso or Matamoros / Brownsville; 2) recognize that there are large swaths of land available for development along the border, mostly in the US side, and think of these as opportunities for a border infrastructure that addresses both the environmental sustainability and the social sustainability of border communities; and 3) battle the North-American dependency on the automobile and how policies that privilege cars have become a major security issue on the border.

Los textos reunidos en este tomo son el resultado de veinte a os de investigaci n sobre la arquitectura moderna
brasile a, sobre su diseminaci n y penetraci n, su genialidad y sus contradicciones, desde la Pampulha hasta las favelas pasando por las casitas de clase media y los maestros alba iles que construyeron todo eso.

Entonces, qu hay de excepcional en la arquitectura moderna brasile a? Ser a su exuberancia pl stica? El milagro de arquitectura llamado Oscar Niemeyer del que hablaba L cio Costa en 1951? Su supuesta capacidad de subvertir la matriz corbusiana? Ser a el encuentro de esta misma arquitectura con la voluntad constructora de Juscelino Kubitschek - encuentro que ocurri en la orillas de una laguna de mi ciudad natal diez a os antes del texto de Costa, o sea, en 1941? O ser a excepcional el rigor tect nico paulista que se cristaliz en la d cada subsiguiente al referido texto y que domina el imaginario de la arquitectura con A may scula del pa s hasta hoy, 75 a os de despu s de Pampulha y cincuenta a os despu s de la FAU USP?

Existe, sin embargo, una excepcionalidad del caso brasile o, y este es el eje central de este libro. La escala de la diseminaci n y de la apropiaci n popular del vocabulario y de la espacialidad moderna en Brasil es impar, efectivamente excepcional.

Street Matters links urban policy and planning with street protests in Brazil. It begins with the 2013 demonstrations that ostensibly began over public transportation fare increases but quickly grew to address larger questions of inequality. This inequality is physically manifested across Brazil, most visibly in its sprawling urban favelas. The authors propose an understanding of the social and spatial dynamics at play that is based on property, labor, and security. They stitch together the history of plans for urban space with the popular protests that Brazilians organized to fight for property and land. They embed the history of civil society within the history of urban planning and its institutionalization to show how urban and regional planning played a key role in the management of the social conflicts surrounding land ownership. If urban and regional planning at times benefited the expansion of civil rights, it also often worked on behalf of class exploitation, deepening spatial inequalities and conflicts embedded in different city spaces.