The book provides an overview of the longterm research and exhibition project Paraíso Ocupado, which revives a little-known architectural plan designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa. Originally planned for Barra da Tijuca, a neighborhood in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, the late modernist plan envisioned an integrated city with hundreds of circular towers, in which a varied composition of different social classes would live together. Amid rampant speculation and endemic corruption, the socialist dream failed, and instead the neighborhood developed into a fortress of gated communities. Central to the project is the discovery of a bankrupt developer's abandoned archive found in the ruin of one of the three actually constructed circular towers. This unique discovery sheds light on the singularities of Barra da Tijuca's urbanization process. The book discusses the relevance of this material in relation to the recent economic and political crises.

Berlin-based artist Wouter Osterholt received his bachelor degree in fine arts from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2001. He develops site-specific projects in which he explores the public sphere as a domain in which different communities collide. By adopting a research approach similar to investigative journalism, he seeks to reveal and unravel conflicting interests that define local politics and the organization of the public. Osterholt was artists-in-residence at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo (EG), the MAK Center in Los Angeles (US), Capacete in Rio de Janeiro (BR), IASKA in Perth (AUS), and at PIST in Istanbul (TR), and more. He exhibited works at: SKOR (NL), Frisian Museum (NL), the 13th Istanbul biennial (TR), the Townhouse Gallery (EG), Schunck, museum in Heerlen (NL), etc. He gave presentations at Mediamatic, Amsterdam (NL); Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Berlin (DE); W139, Amsterdam, (NL); University of Central Lancashire, Preston (UK); and the Centre for Independent Social Research (CISR), Saint Petersburg (RU), and more.

Ingrid Hapke holds a PhD degree in Lusophone culture and media from Hamburg University; she graduated as MA in romance studies and historical anthropology from Freiburg University. She was a guest researcher at University of São Paulo (USP), State and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, UFRJ, 2009–10). Hapke is an intercultural mediator, translator from Portuguese, Spanish, and English as well as an author of articles in academic and independent media and books about literary activism, as she understands literature and its field to be an important vehicle for political discourses. Hapke teaches culture, language, and literature at universities and schools. She collaborates with artists in different projects (e.g. Be not a servant of men, Paraguay/Netherlands, 2013). As founding member of the cultural collective Urban Artitude she cocurated the First Week of Marginal Literature in Germany with poets from the Brazilian and German peripheries (2013).