(chair session) Urban policies, design and social justice in 21st century cities: paradoxes and challenges.

RODRIGUEZ, MARÍA CARLA; DEVALLE, VERÓNICA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; ISA Forum 2012.; 2012

ISA

Urban policies, design and social justice in 21st century cities: paradoxes and challenges. Carla Rodríguez Verónica Devalle During the last few years, urban sociology moved more deeply into interdiscipline in order to deal with structural variables and, at the same time, to focus on political and cultural processes. In fact, new challenges are added to the city’s research agenda: the role of the so called “creative economies” and their strong association with design poles, the development of and the wager on non-polluting cultural industries, the virtualisation of a large part of the economic and financial processes as well as of the political and social ones. All these changes coexist with other classic problems of urban sociology: socio-spatial segregation, renovation processes, and the persistence of social injustice within the city. This session intends to tackle present day urban policies –particularly those referred to the public and housing space- in a scenario where vast social sectors find increasing difficulties to fulfil access to urban “centrality” (Lefevbre, 1972), simultaneously with a sustained deployment of real estate capital, that radically modifies our cities’ geography as “urbanisation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2000). The analyses encouraged in this session focus on critical readings in which the analyses of specific policies are linked to the more integral characteristics of the socio-political processes in course, many of them with a transforming direction. Which novelties, tensions and paradoxes appear in the cities? Which are –or should be as a political and ethical challenge- today’s parameters for the development of policies that respond to the horizon of rights accomplishment? Additionally, as a complementary perspective to these first considerations, we summon those researchers that analyse the role of design (urban, house planning, objects and communications) in urban changes during the last decade. In this sense, there is a search for the relation between the “rights to beauty” and the “rights to the city” and to promote the analysis of cases that problematize these issues, facing the challenges posed by a democratic, inclusive and fair policy in the cities. Finally, the idea is to study the phenomenon of the redesign of the city’s image (what has been called “city trademark”) and the way in which it has participated in the process of urban renovation and, eventually, in the logics of enlarged capital reproduction that has marked most of the urban transformation processes in Latin American scenarios during the last few decades.