Molecular Urban Revolutions? Reassembled and affective territories in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro

In the line of the theoretical framework presented on The Emergent City (Deleuze Studies Conference 2012) the paper seeks to explain the emergent city in terms of three reassembled and affective territories found in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Through studies of a spatial intervention on the brutalist highway Minhocão in Sao Paulo by Muda Coletivo, a reuse center and boxing academy under the highway Glicério in São Paulo, and emergent communicative territories around the infrastructure Teleférico in Complexo do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro, I will look into how urban territories are temporarily created by means of affective and assembled spaces.

Finally, the paper will discuss notions of (spatial) singularization by elaborating on Suely Rolnik and Félix Guattari’s travel book, Molecular Revolutions in Brazil (2007). How, for instance, does spatial interventions relate to and transform global capitalism today? How can we identify the modes of spatial production in global cities today, and in what degree can we see spatial singularity in the three cases? Are they at the same time part of mass culture and spatial means of rejecting capitalist modes of established urban encoding?