Vicente Brêtas

Biography and Research

I I am a geographer and urban planner. Coming from an urban studies background, I have a keen interest in the way cities are materially produced and reproduced by and through world-spamming flows of knowledge. My research can be characterized as a deep-dive into the policy mobilities of sustainable urban governance. I specifically address North-South modalities of policy transfer, focusing on the role played by Global North institutions in the international dissemination of supposedly green frameworks for urban planning and management, particularly in Latin America. I investigate, therefore, how mainstream notions of urban sustainability are constituted, mobilized and circulated through international, multiscalar policy networks, as well as how they are translated into concrete policies at the local scale. It is my understanding that such notions, discursively framed as purely technical, are embedded with political connotations, and therefore the idea of urban sustainability constitutes a legitimizing vehicle for the advancement of different agendas through various localities and scales. In this context, my main interest lies not only in better understanding the ideological connotations and the economic rationality underpinning current regulatory frameworks for sustainable urban development, but also in how those frameworks interact with local dynamics to produce new urban spatial configurations and socionatures.