Porous City is the cultural history of a central area of Rio de Janeiro, Praça XI, widely considered one of the historical and cultural hearts of the city. Planned as part of Cidade Nova (New City), a region intended to attract affluent people, the area ‘decayed’ prematurely once the upper classes moved to more salubrious neighbourhoods around the oceanic coastline. Praça XI and the surrounding area, consequently, became a place for the most disparate and ‘undesirable’ ethnic groups, above all Afro-Brazilians, whose strong presence granted the area the name of ‘Little Africa’. With its concentration of hustlers, prostitutes, bohemians and followers of African-derived voodoo, the area certainly enjoyed notoriety in Rio de Janeiro. However, Praça XI's lower-class melting pot inspired a large number of artists, emerging as one of the cradles of Rio de Janeiro's samba and carnival. Bruno Carvalho takes the reader on an exciting journey through Praça XI's history until the early 1940s, when a vast area of central Rio was demolished for a new, modernising project: the construction of Presidente Vargas Avenue. The physical dismembering of Praça XI has represented the loss of an important piece of the city's past. However, its heritage has remained imprinted forever on the city's identity and art, while its physical ‘absence’ today confers a somewhat mystical character on Praça XI and its memories.

From a stylistic point of view, Porous City is written in fine prose, which contributes to making the book very pleasant reading. The main merit of Carvalho's work, nonetheless, lies in the rich methodology used for the research, and on the author's cultural analysis of the social dynamics that existed in the area. By engaging with a number of sources such as literature, music, films, visual arts, travellers' memoirs, newspaper articles and other archival documents referring to Praça XI, Carvalho enhances the aura of deserved immortality of this space. The reader is provided with a generous range of references, which will be helpful both to researchers from different disciplines and to a much broader readership. A central concept in the book is the idea of ‘porosity’. Carvalho uses this term to express the ability of Rio's urban space to absorb the diverse mass of people and cultures that interacted and recombined within it (Afro-Brazilian, Gipsy, Jewish and Italian, among others). Better than ‘syncretism’, ‘porosity’ emphasises a constant process of combination and tension between different components that never perfectly merge or dissolve. As Carvalho suggests, the cultural thriving of Praça XI is to be ascribed partly to its relative isolation from the rest of the city space, and partly to its interaction with ‘outside’ others. While this idea can be used to explain historically the cultural and social fabric of the area in question, it also works as an allegory of Brazilian identity, whose formation and existence has been made possible through the encounter/tension between social, cultural and racial differences. From this perspective, the case study used by Carvalho is much broader than its geographical focus. It is the story of a city and a country that have constantly reinvented themselves to embody the changing times, but never really managed to disperse a feeling of their past. The author looks at these transformations with great sensitivity and, more importantly, without conveying that judgemental sense of nostalgia and regret that is too often found in studies on memory.

One of the aspects that I found most interesting in Carvalho's analysis is its relevance for the present day, a time when central areas of Rio de Janeiro are subject to a new wave of modernisation, and great attention is being paid particularly to Afro-Brazilian heritage in Brazil. Carvalho rightly refers to the links between Praça XI's past and Brazil's present. Perhaps these links could have been explored more deeply in the concluding section of the book. In contrast, I felt that the information in chapter 2 (largely dealing with the writer Machado de Assis and his work) could have been reduced and dispersed among other chapters. As a minor point, I would have liked to read more about the geographically-contiguous docklands of Rio de Janeiro, and particularly about the relations between the dockworkers and the cultural scenario that Carvalho describes for Praça XI. Instead, I felt somewhat that the author left the port too much in the background of the story, while in fact the docklands represented a crucial place of arrival and work for many of the ethnic and social groups that the author explores in the context of Praça XI. In the same vein, I also felt that the dockworkers' renowned contribution to samba and carnival could have been emphasised more. As a very minor point, Porous City seems primarily written for people who are not very familiar with Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. A version in Portuguese could be slightly retouched so as to avoid statements and descriptions that would seem too obvious to a Brazilian audience. These minor points by no means diminish the value of Carvalho's book, which I deeply enjoyed, and which I enthusiastically recommend to lovers of Brazilian cultural history.