Urban archives: counter-colonial practices for historicizing the margins

This article proposes Urban Archives as a political-epistemological tactic for visually engaging in producing urban histories from and with the margins, as proposed by Thaís Rosa. We argue that historicizing popular and often racialised territories requires confluence between three methodological dimensions: documental research in institutional archives, oral history practices that activate collective memory, and ethnographic attitudes that place researchers’ bodies within the city-as-archive, as proposed by Samuel Burgum. Through collaborative creative research practices in Belo Horizonte’s eastern margins, specifically in Taquaril and Mariano de Abreu, we demonstrate how this confluence enables understanding that exceeds what any singular approach could generate. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s distinction between archive and repertoire, Ariella Azoulay’s concept of co-citizenship, Antônio Bispo dos Santos’ concept of counter-colonialism, and practices of seeing with, as articulated by Fred Moten and Priscila Musa, we show how Urban Archives aims to fundamentally reorganise who has the power to historicize the city. Urban Archives may not be replicated as a fixed methodological protocol, but it offers principles for situated practice, including refusing epistemic hierarchies, recognising that knowledge already exists in margins, requiring embodied territorial presence, and producing through alliances that acknowledge power asymmetries. This approach demonstrates that counter-colonial research methods can generate more rigorous and accountable urban scholarship while supporting ongoing struggles for housing rights and territorial justice in Brazilian cities.