Reflexiones sobre el urbanismo (subalterno) en América Latina. Conflictos, alianzas y convivencia en los procesos de "hacer ciudad".

RAMIRO SEGURA

Köln

Conferencia; Ringvorlesung Lateinamerika; 2023

Center for Latin American Studies (CLAC) / Spanish-Portuguese-Latin American Studies Association (ASPLA). Universität zu Köln

From the restricted theoretical geographies that dominant the urban studies (Robinson, 2002), 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 supposedly characterize the urban experience of the Global North. However, since the foundation of the Spanish cities and the Jesuit missions as artifacts to order the colonial world to the urban planning as the engine of development and modernization during the 20th century, among other projects and politics, in Latin American thought the city has been linked to modernity (and its debates) in an even more direct way than in the case of European thought (Rama, 1984). Instead the normative and Eurocentric point of view about Latin American urbanism, for this presentation I recover a tradition of inquiries about Latin American cities that focused on the “cultural borders” (Romero, 1976) as tense and productive encounters between different and unequal groups in the urban space and I reflect on the asymmetric, conflictive and negotiated ways in which the subaltern sectors in Latin America "make the city" (Agier, 2015). Latin American cities are thought of as "cultural arenas" (Morse, 1982; Gorelik and Peixoto, 2016), socially unequal and culturally heterogeneous contexts in which encounters, dialogues and conflicts take place over the forms, meanings and uses of the city. I propose to follow the traces of "subaltern urbanism" (Roy, 2011), legible not only in the widespread self-production practices that constitute an omnipresent mark of the Latin American urban landscape, but also in a multiplicity of practices (fairs, street vendors, hip hop, saraus, graffiti, etc.) that in profoundly asymmetric contexts negotiate their presence in the city and often destabilize the hierarchical and racialized socio-spatial order that has characterized Latin American urban planning since colonial times.