Alessandro Angelini is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His dissertation, titled “Model Favela: Youth and Second Nature in Rio de Janeiro,” is an examination of urban planning, police surveillance, the financialization of housing through the lens of youth play. The project recounts the peculiar history of an ongoing role-playing game enacted in a miniature mock-up of Rio. Based on 18 months of fieldwork as both human researcher and avatar inhabitant of this diminutive world, Angelini explores spatial play, risk and security as a methods for imagining the city as an always imminent virtual object.
