Bruno Carvalho

An urbanist’s lifelong study of the “rhythm of cities,” from Rio to Cambridge

Bruno Carvalho stands in front of a city background

Bruno Carvalho

Photograph by Jim Harrison

As a child, urbanist Bruno Carvalho explored his native Rio de Janeiro in search of four things: soccer, books, films, and music. The city bus took Carvalho, now a professor of romance languages and literatures and co-director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, everywhere he needed to go: to empty fields, sandy beaches, and the Maracanã Stadium for soccer; to Rio’s numerous used bookstores, where he got an “early education in the canon of Brazilian poetry”; and to the “serendipitous social spaces” of video rental stores and record shops. “I sort of became an urbanist without realizing it, learning the rhythms of cities,” he says. Walking the streets of Rio, he would recognize workers in stores and restaurants and know when each profession got off work. The study of cities came into focus for him at Dartmouth College, where he met his architect wife. They began “building-watching” for fun. “We joined forces,” he says, combining her design knowledge with his urban-planning expertise to “try to figure out” new cities: “Every building is a puzzle for us.” Like his hometown of Rio, bordered by rainforest, Carvalho’s recent work lies at the intersection of the urban and the environmental—a natural launching point for his New York Times op-eds denouncing deforestation of the Amazon. Now, when not chasing his three-year-old daughter or putting her to sleep with João Gilberto bossa nova records, he’s working on a book about how people have imagined urban futures since the 1790s. The project requires the kind of synthesis inherent to urban studies (and one he finds continually inspiring), unifying his disparate interests like music, film, and the environment. “They all come together in the city,” he says. “They came together in the city for me as a child, and they still do today.”

Click here for the November-December 2021 issue table of contents

Read more articles by Nancy Walecki

You might also like

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Radcliffe Institute Announces 2025-2026 Fellows

Scholars pursue projects ranging from reducing ethnic violence to searching for an undiscovered super-Earth.

Danielle Allen Debates Far-Right Blogger Curtis Yarvin

Popular monarchist debates Allen on democracy.

Most popular

This is How Universities Die

Higher ed thrived in Berlin and Beijing. Then government stepped in. 

Harvard President Responds to Secretary of Education

Alan Garber outlines steps the University has taken, and emphasizes compliance with the law.

Harvard Medical School Renames Diversity Office, Revamps Recruitment Program

The latest in a broader rollback of DEI at the University

Explore More From Current Issue

The Trump Administration's Impact on Higher Education

Unprecedented federal actions against research funding, diversity, speech, and more

Children's Books from Ann Kim Ha

Ann Kim Ha’s poignant children’s books

Biology's "Mirror Organisms"—And Their Dangers

Life forms built from left-handed DNA and RNA could threaten Earth’s plants, animals, and insects.