The organic metaphor in twentieth-century Lusophone urban geography: cities and their history in the work of Aroldo de Azevedo and Orlando Ribeiro

Luso-Brazilian geographies? The making of epistemic communities in semi-peripheral academic human geography

“…Azevedo and Ribeiro would maintain a strong friendship throughout the years, which paved the way for further exchanges between Brazilian and Portuguese geographers. They also established a common organicist language in urban geography, one which influenced a generation of Brazilian and Portuguese urban geographers concerned with the history and the formation of cities (Paiva and Oliveira, 2019). Ribeiro visited the Universidade de São Paulo during a fieldwork mission funded by the IAC in 1952 and took part in a series of fieldtrips led by Azevedo, which resulted in a paper he published in Portugal on São Paulo and a draft on Brazilian cities that was published posthumously (Ribeiro, 1955, 2014).…”

“…Several articles described the Brazilian urban landscape, especially focusing on the historic cores of cities (Araújo Filho, 1969; Corte, 1969; Dias, 1970; Penteado, 1966; Soares, 1966). These studies followed the descriptive and organicist perspective on cities established by Azevedo and Ribeiro (Paiva and Oliveira, 2019). On the other hand, a significant number of articles focused on the changes in agricultural systems and their spatial structures in Brazil (Diniz, 1969; Reis, 1971a; Valverde, 1967, 1968a, 1968b), a topic which was also studied by Brito (1969) and Ribeiro (1966c, 1967b) during this period.…”

History and philosophy of geography I: Decolonising the discipline, diversifying archives and historicising radicalism

“…This congress is normally considered as the foundation act of critical and radical geographies in the country, following the withdrawal of some of the most repressive laws of the military dictatorship, and the return from exile of key figures such as Santos. Furthermore, Portuguese scholarship acknowledges the need to rediscover the influential role of scholars outside the ‘core’, by arguing that authors such as Portuguese Orlando Ribeiro and Brazilian Aroldo de Azevedo appropriated originally elements from the French school rather than being merely tributaries of the North for geographical theory (Paiva and Roque de Oliveira, 2019).…”