Crossing Texts, References and Images. A Survey of a City Planner’s Personal Library in São Paulo (1920-1960) (2/2)

Abstract

This dossier includes two articles analyzing texts, images and their references in a case study addressing some of the issues that are central to think about the history of urbanism today: cultural relations, transnationalism and visual culture, along with themes connected to intellectual biographies. 1 Crossed histories about a Brazilian engineer, architect and professor of city planning, Luiz de Anhaia Mello (1891Mello ( -1974, or his relationship to the ideas of the authors he recalls from his personal library and urban representations of his time, illuminate understandings of the themes he wrote about. This allows to deep knowledge of his urban references and the ways foreign books and journals were received and circulated in São Paulo, Brazil, especially North American ones, between the 1920s and 1950s. Therefore, a shared dimension of textual and visual documents about city planning stands out in those years, particularized by the originality of intersecting biographical and bibliographic plots.The first article gives precise examples of the network of textual relations between the books from Luiz de Anhaia Mello's personal library and his own texts. The second article tackles the study of the visual representations of urban problems in sources quoted by him, and bring analyses to the ways they circulated among planners of his generation. The study of printed images in urbanism within the cross-stories of authors permits us to observe connections between their knowledge and the visual universe they had access to. The images thus carry their own significance as vehicles of ideas.We know that the golden years of publications about planners -who "dreamed the modern city," playing a role in institutions, associations, academies and municipal government agencies-has composed a prolific historiography since the 1960s and was enriched in many countries during the 1970s and 1980s, until around the 2010s. Nevertheless, for some countries, these are still themes of special relevance, especially referring to intellectual history and visual studies. In both cases, this dossier brings an original analysis, providing better knowledge of the diffusion of books, periodicals and printed iconography representing issues of city planning. These were consulted by the engineer Luiz de Anhia Mello and mentioned in his numerous texts written in Portuguese in São Paulo, Brazil, which explain their limited circulation in the annals of Urban History.Indeed, the study of social actors' intellectual trajectories, with regard to the particular situation of their cities of residence and around the global matters of their time, can still be considered a viable methodological strategy. In this case, when I analyze the texts of Anhaia Mello in light of the authors he read, or when I collect the images he saw while considering their visual effects, I enroll myself in variants of this strategy. Its pertinence to a historiography under construction, such as the one on Brazilian's city planning issues, goes beyond an eventual dated approach. Im...