CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The public lecture aims to reflect on southern urbanism from the historical and ethnographic approach of the city of La Plata, Argentina, created as a modern planned city at the end of the 19th century. The cities of the Global South, especially Latin American cities, have been characterized by their excesses (too big) and/or their deficiencies (too many problems) with respect to the parameters that would supposedly characterize the urban experience of the Global North. In this framework, the historical and social evolution of cities such as La Plata have been interpreted as an expression of "frustrated modernity", describing an historical movement that went from "the ideal city" to the "broken square". Precisely the notion of fragmentation coined by the Los Angeles School at the end of the 20th century is a recurrent concept-metaphor to describe the urban processes of recent decades in Latin American cities, characterized by the increase of social inequalities, crimes and insecurities, and social segmentations and walls. Without ignoring these processes but recovering a tradition of inquiries about Latin American cities that focused on the "cultural arenas" (Morse) and the "cultural borders" (Romero) as tense and productive encounters between different and unequal groups in the urban space, I propose to move from fragmentation to conviviality. While a concept like fragmentation tend to emphasize distance, separation, and reciprocal isolation between groups and social classes, the framework of conviviality is a useful analytical tool to examine the contexts of interaction, negotiation and conflict about social positions and cultural identifications within and about urban settings. Viewed from the lens of conviviality, Latin American cities not only appear as conflictive and negotiated spaces, but also because of practices of composition of common places between different and unequal actors.

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