From the Wolverhampton ring road, to providing homes for the rural poor, Dr Samuel Brandt has many and varied interests in human geography.

The Gonville & Caius College Fellow’s fascination with British urban geography was spawned by an interest in travel, Premier League football and Monty Python. During his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, his British supervisor supported his wish to investigate transportation in the UK after the Second World War. 

And Sam wanted to explore beyond the travel guidebooks he had collected since childhood, questioning the places which had global reputations due to the Premier League – Wigan, Bolton and, yes, Wolverhampton, home of Wolverhampton Wanderers, commonly known as Wolves.

“I wrote about the history of the Wolverhampton ring road, comparing it to Stoke, Derby and Coventry,” says Sam, referring to three further places which have had Premier League clubs.

“How was it built, why was it built and what impact did it have? I was interested in it partly from watching Monty Python, which showed the drabness of post-war Britain.

“And seeing cities from watching soccer that would never be in the guidebooks – Wigan, Bolton…” 

Sam’s main academic interest is in a country which has a football obsession and hosted the first World Cup, in 1930 – Uruguay. 

He first travelled to the South American country in 2014, on a nine-month US Fulbright studentship, and became fascinated by MEVIR, short for Movimiento Pro Erradicación de la Vivienda Insalubre Rural (Movement for the Eradication of Unhealthy Rural Housing). MEVIR was founded in 1967 to provide dignified living for rural labourers. It has built over 34,000 homes and other public buildings in towns of 5,000 people or less across a country with a population of 3.5 million people, but whose land area is larger than England’s. Conducting a history and ethnography of this housing programme for the rural poor became the focus of Sam’s PhD at UCLA and is now the subject of a book which is in preparation.

His interdisciplinary work covers numerous subjects: Latin American studies, urbanism, development studies and geography.

Sam adds: “Here’s a policy which provides a concrete and lasting solution for the people that live there. It works for both the participants, who come from the lower income quintiles, and for the rural population as a whole. I found that in the ethnographic fieldwork.”

It may seem strange to study Uruguay from Cambridge, but the country is more accessible from Europe than from the west coast of the United States, and being in close proximity to Spain, Portugal and France is advantageous for Sam, who enjoys the interdisciplinary approach at the Centre of Latin American Studies and within Caius.

Sam is exploring whether such schemes could be replicated elsewhere, but acknowledges unique circumstances in Uruguay made MEVIR possible after recognising a problem which needed to be addressed. 

Sam adds: “A lot of it is place dependent, coming out of a specific context of time and place, Uruguay in the Sixties, and how democratic institutions in that country are run. The specific rural context, the way they build these homes, the population it’s addressing does not necessarily exist in other countries.

“This institution has been shepherded through democracy and 12 years of dictatorship (1973-1985) and through different political parties, who have crafted it in their image, but kept the overall mission, housing for the rural poor. There’s an immense sense of pride for all the people involved, from the family all the way to the country.

“It’s significantly improved the quality of life for a vulnerable population for over 60 years. Poverty still happens there. But this programme has made a big dent in how people live. People can stay in the places that they call home and not reluctantly move to a city where they don’t fit in.”

Dr Samuel Brandt is a Research Fellow at Caius. Applications for Research Fellowships are open until September 30: Research Fellowship Competition | Gonville & Caius