The Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is the core event series of interdisciplinary dialogs organized by the Fellows of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities.

The Fall 2024 Mellon Forum is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, African Studies, Anthropology, Art & Archaeology, Brazil Lab, Center for Collaborative History, Chadha Global India Center, Effron Center for American Studies, English, French & Italian, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Humanities Council, PIIRS, Program in Latin American Studies, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the School of Architecture.

All events are free and open to the public. Check individual event listings for more information.

September 11 / 12pm School of Architecture
Routes of Power: Transportation Technology and Socio-Urban Transformation in Early Modern Paris
Jennifer Strtak, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Basile Baudez, Art + Archaeology

Scholars of the early modern period have traditionally accorded carriages a symbolic role in the
historiography as material expressions of ostentatious display and social elitism. Yet these
objects are captivating for more than the signifying prowess of their ornate exteriors. This talk,
using a case study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, reinterprets carriages as
catalysts of profound social, political, and environmental changes. Drawing on legal records,
financial accounts, guidebooks, and visual depictions of the capital, I reveal how the nobility and
bourgeoisie’s adoption of vehicle technology physically embedded uneven power dynamics and
social injustices into the city’s fabric. The erosion of walkable street space to accommodate
wheeled traffic in the heart of the capital and the police’s use of carriages to covertly transport
the city’s poor to prisons for colonial deportation illustrate how early modern vehicles emerged
as contentious entities. The interaction between transportation technology and society in early
modern Paris thus allows us to reconsider several key aspects of urban life: the enforcement of
bureaucratic control, imperial expansion, socio-economic stratification, the development of city
infrastructure, and the freedoms and constraints on everyday human movement.

September 18 / 12pm School of Architecture
South Africa’s Food Apartheid: Infrastructure and Everyday Urbanism in the Post-Colonial African City
Blessings Masuku, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Hanna Garth, Anthropology

Over 2.6 million South African households have inadequate access to food, and 1.1 million
households face a severe food shortage. This problem is particularly acute in major metro areas.
This prevalence of food inadequacy varies significantly by gender, citizenship, region, and city.
Informal food markets provide both access to food and are the primary source of income for over
70% of South Africa’s poor and marginalized urban populations. Yet informal food markets
remain neglected by public policy and institutional funding. Building off a multimodal study in
and around the city of Johannesburg, this talk will argue that achieving spatial justice, food
justice and sustainable food security in the context of urban inequality and increasing climate
variability are some of the most pressing challenges for the contemporary South African city.

October 2 / 12pm School of Architecture
Territories of Ambivalence: Architecture and Dictatorship in 1970s Brazil
Victor Próspero, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Miqueias Mugge, Brazil Lab

Brazil lived under a far-right military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. This regime was deeply
entangled with the construction industry, which was the basis of the so-called “Brazilian
miracle” from 1968 to 1973: an economic boom based on authoritarianism and infrastructure
developments throughout the national territory. The making of new infrastructures connecting
the country and radically transforming its landscapes—with intense environmental impacts—was
one of the major objects of the regime’s propaganda. Some highlights were the dictatorship’s
discourse on fostering the Amazon “colonization” through its new roadways, or the advanced
concrete technology used in cases such as the Rio-Niteroi bridge and the São Paulo elevated
subway stations. This presentation will reflect on how the local architectural field (despite
political orientation) was deeply entangled in the regime’s functioning. Its active participation in
the making of a new built environment across the country is a revealing meeting point of
antagonist political spectrums through modernization epistemologies. Moreover, the regime’s
territorial planning and radical landscape interventions served as a reference for the architects’
imaginaries of “building territory,” constituting a central aspect of tension and ambivalence in
the field’s political and disciplinary culture.

October 29 / 12pm School of Architecture
Against Architectures of Degradation: Pōhaku and Protection on Mauna Kea
Caitlin Blanchfield, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Ikaika Ramones, Anthropology

This talk examines practices of erasure and resistance through the use of pōhaku (stone) on the
Mauna Kea volcano Hawai‘i island, and within the boundaries of the Mauna Kea Science
Reserve. Mauna Kea is a sacred site point of genealogical connection for Kānaka Maoli, it is also
a contested landscape: Crown and Government land seized from the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1898,
held in trust by the territorial and then state government, and leased in 1968 to the University of
Hawai‘i to host an ever-expanding astronomy industry. Since the inception of the Mauna Kea
observatories, Kānaka Maoli kia‘i (protectors) and environmental activists have resisted the
increasing construction of large scale telescopes on Mauna Kea for both their degradation of the
land and their violation of Hawaiian sovereignty. One way they have done that is through the
built environment.

November 13 / 12pm School of Architecture
Toward a Third Monumentality: The Soviet Reception of Mexican Architectural Modernism
Da Hyung Jeong, Princeton-Mellon Fellow
Michael Brinley, History

This talk brings into dialogue two contexts that have tended to remain on the fringe of
architectural historiography, namely Mexico and the Soviet ‘peripheries,’ or the non-Russian
republics of the vast communist empire. After revealing striking analogies and parallelism—at
the level of form, technique and undergirding discourse—between the new understandings of
‘monumentality’ (monumentalidad, monumental’nost’) that emerged in postwar Mexico on the
one hand and in the margins of the late Soviet Union on the other, it will hypothesize a network
of knowledge exchange from which the so-called ‘First World’ was deliberately excluded, one
that sustained and nurtured an affective material culture expressive of postcolonial sentiments,
desires and aspirations. The close copies of Mexican designs produced in Soviet Central Asia
are, as will be argued, to be read as contrarian texts betraying a yearning for a critical regionalist
alternative both to Western modernism, dismissed as irreconcilable with socialist culture, and so-called
Soviet modernism, which was really a form of Russian cultural imperialism in disguise.