55 research outputs found
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One Size Does Not Fit All: Land Markets and Property Rights for the Construction of the Just City
This essay reflects on alternative urban markets and property right systems in some Latin American countries. What becomes clear is that one size does not fit all: land markets and property rights are multifaceted and their conception and implementation should be context-sensitive. In recent experiments and proposals in Brazil, El Salvador and Venezuela, among other countries, they are being used as instruments for the expansion of rights to the city and the construction of the just city
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Models of Urban Governance and Planning in Latin America and the United States: Associationism, Regime Theory, and Communicative Action
In many American and Latin American cities alike, urban governance and planning are either in urgent need of reform or are currently undergoing haphazard reform. In many cases, innovative attempts to implement reforms have failed because the inability of cities to develop their 'civic capacity' -- the capacity to build and maintain broad social and political multi-sectoral coalitions in pursuit of common goals. This article argues that these significant points of convergence are productive building blocks for the construction of more generalizable models of urban governance and planning in democratic cities in the Americas and beyond. It situates coalition and network politics at the center of urban planning and governance reform, suggesting that associationism and regime theory can be instrumental at analyzing the status of civic capacity of urban communities. Furthermore, this article claims that the points of convergence between these models of governance may achieve a more powerful synergy and productive status as tools for both analysis and action through their synthesis in, and reinforcement of, the notion of communicative action in urban planning theory and practice
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Constitutional Reforms in Venezuela Foretell a Planning Revolution
The National Assembly of Venezuela is discussing a proposal by President Hugo Chávez to change thirty-three of the 350 articles of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The proposed changes would create new forms of land tenure and restructure the nation’s governance system, both of which are essential to urban planning. The changes attempt to address the obstacles posed by a corrupt and ineffective bureaucracy created largely as a result of the huge surplus from Venezuela’s petroleum- dependent economy. The bureaucracy has often paralyzed and sabotaged the revolutionary process. The Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution has often been criticized for both continuing the corrupt, bureaucratic status quo and consolidating state power in the hands of a single individual. While both these conditions exist, they do not account for the most significant element of the revolutionary process, what George Ciccariello-Maher calls “the explosion of communal power.” Communal power is to be found in the dynamic community-based movements that make up the largest base of power for Chávez, including new “community councils” being formed in many neighborhoods. The constitutional reform seeks to consolidate and expand communal power, transform the bureaucracy and provide the president with more ways to maneuver around the obstacles to decentralization, devolution and socialization of the economy
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Localizing Urban Design Traditions: Gated and Edge Cities in Curitiba
Gated communities and edge cities are new forms of space production and consumption that promote changes in the character of public space and citizens' participation in public life. This study unveils the phenomena of their creation as a paradoxical attempt to return to community. Curitiba's examples of gated communities and edge cities show that, despite being internationally showcased as a model of good planning and urban design, this metropolis has not been immune to the global capital pressures and urban design tendencies occurring in many urban areas throughout the world, thus signalling both the currency and trans-nationality of these issues
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Do Pruitt-Igoe ao World Trade Center Planejando a Ex/Implosão do (Pós)Modernismo
O artigo discute, em meio a conceitos de pós-modernidade, as semelhanças na destruição de dois marcos da arquitetura moderna: o conjunto residencial Pruitt-Igoe (PI) e o World Trade Center (WTC). Argumenta que a destruição, tanto do PI como do WTC, deveu-se não apenas à questão física (no PI, uma destruição planejada pela sociedade, e no WTC, uma destruição por ela não planejada); pelo contrário, a queda de ambos os edifícios seria uma materialização do fim do pensamento modernista, do qual seriam símbolos. Contrariamente ao que foi dito a respeito do 11/09/2001, propõe que naquela hora o mundo já havia mudado e que a destruição do WTC foi apenas a representação da mudança. Seguindo essa argumentação, o artigo propõe inovações no campo do planejamento e da arquitetura, assim como novas concepções para espaços contemporâneos, a exemplo dos projetos do novo WTC
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La arquitectura y la producción de imágenes de tarjeta postal. La invocación de la tradición versus el regionalismo crítico en Curitiba
Curitiba, metrópoli de 2.5 millones de habitantes en el estado sureño de Paraná, Brasil, ha realizado grandes esfuerzos en los últimos 35 años por mejorar SU imagen y calidad urbana, hasta el punto de alcanzar reconocimiento mundial y ser tenida por muchos como modelo de planeación y administración urbana. Si bien algunos de los aspectos de esta transformación han sido ampliamente documentados como el sistema de tránsito, la creación de parques urbanos y el desarrollo de programas de reciclaje- falta hacer aún una evaluación critica de su experiencia. A fin de contribuir a esta tarea el presente ensayo intenta, a partir del fenómeno en Curitiba, una discusión teórica y empírica de lo que se ha convertido en una tendencia mundial del nuevo siglo como invención y consumo de tradición. Discuto cómo los temas de trasfondo vernáculo son utilizados por los funcionarios del gobierno local para invocar las tradiciones arquitectónicas internacionales en beneficio de la imagen urbana y el desarrollo turístico de su ciudad. Finalmente, propongo que el regionalismo crítico es un enfoque alternativo que puede aprovechar mejor las oportunidades de desarrollo arquitectónico y urbano, de modo que sirva a las necesidades de la región y la vincule con la economía global de manera competitiva. Para ilustrar esta conclusión, analizo dos ejemplos arquitectónicos
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Introduction: What do we mean by 'transbordering Latin Americas'
This book, Transbordering Latin Americas: Liminal Places, Cultures, and Powers (T)Here, explores transbordering/transnational Latin American sociocultural and spatial conditions across the globe and across scales—from the gendered and racialized body to the national and transnational arena. What do we mean by “transbordering Latin Americas”? When we use the plural Latin Americas, we purposefully implode the notion of a unified, cohesive, and static Latin America and a corresponding singular identity—a way of being or being perceived as Latin American. The phrase “transbordering Latin Americas” thus comprises instances of that which can be defined as “Latin American” (which is, in turn, open to debate and transformation), which occurs through plurilocal societal relations—existing within, between, and above the traditional container spaces of national and continental societies without clear or stable “motherlands” (Pries 2004; Irazábal, 2012). Latin Americas in plural aims to push further the problematization of “methodological nationalism,” or the tendency to liken society to the nation-state. Indeed, despite its continuous undeniable importance in framing social dynamics, the nation-state has been debunked as the “natural” unit of the modern world and particularly as a useful one for the study of migration and diasporic phenomena (Duany 2011; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). This book suggests the need to go beyond not only “methodological nationalism” but also “methodological continentalism” to effectively deconstruct and reconstruct the notion of multiple and fluxing Latin Americas
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Prologue: Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events
Scholars have argued that public space is a prerequisite for the expression, representation, preservation, and/or enhancement of democracy (Sassen, 1996; Holston, 1989, 1999; Caldeira, 2000; Low, 2000; Low and Smith, 2006). However, this optimistic outlook is betrayed in reality by the many examples in recent history when public spaces have been used for the deployment and reproduction of totalitarian regimes. In the Americas, we can recount the experiences of Pinochet’s Santiago, Videla’s Buenos Aires, Strossner’s Asuncion, and Pérez Jiménez’s Caracas, among others. Yet, even in those cases, political demonstrations in public spaces conversely played a critical role in the eventual revocation of those regimes, and/or in the subsequent reestablishment of democracy. In both the past and the present, public spaces have been privileged sites for the enactment and contestation of various stances on democracy and citizenship in the public sphere. Indeed, the public sphere, as the intangible realm for the expression, reproduction, and/or recreation of a society’s culture and polity, usually encompasses divergent political visions and nurtures acute social confrontations which are played out in the more tangible public space. This book provides a multidisciplinary approach to the study of citizenship and democracy encompassing both the notion of the public sphere and its spatiality – i.e., its re-presentation in space. Our aim is to redress an imbalance in the literature which has tended to focus on a socio-political approach at the expense of a literally more ‘grounded’ perspective. Thus, the case studies here help to expand and literally to ground the notion of the public sphere in the realm of physical public spaces. The uses and meanings given to and derived from public spaces in the processes of making life and making history (Flacks, 1988) have traditionally been centrepieces of both conceptual and empirical analyses of democracy and citizenship. Public space dynamics also provide ways in which to gauge, analyse, and document the value structures that lie at the core of particular societies and cultures. The selection of case studies from Latin America provides an unprecedented opportunity to look at cities with comparable cultural and political trajectories to investigate the use and meaning of particular urban spaces by ordinary people in extraordinary, history-making events. The collection encompasses multidisciplinary studies of nine Latin American major cities: Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, Caracas, Bogotá, São Paulo, Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires
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Ultrapassando o debate entre convergência e divergência urbanas: a arquitetura e o urbanismo em um contexto global
Alguns pesquisadores argumentam que as cidades do Terceiro e do Primeiro Mundo estão se tornando cada vez mais semelhantes. Outros discordam dessa teoria da convergência, alegando que tais similaridades são apenas superficiais. O presente trabalho sustenta que as discrepâncias entre as duas teorias são mais aparentes que reais e propõe que se aborde a convergência mais no âmbito das soluções do que no âmbito dos problemas, chamando a atenção para o papel da participação cidadã e da governança urbana em bem-sucedidas experiências em cidades tanto do Terceiro Mundo como do Primeiro Mundo. O texto também reflete sobre a arquitetura e o urbanismo da convergência, tais como percebidos nas novas cidades globais, independentemente das divisões Norte/Sul. Por fim, são apresentadas algumas idéias sobre as potencialidades da arquitetura e do urbanismo da divergência como expressões de mudanças nas demandas sociais e na formação de identidades no âmbito urbano
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Realizing Planning's Emancipatory Promise: Learning from Regime Theory to Strengthen Communicative Action
This article informs communicative action theory with insights from urban regime theory. The synthesis proposes a model of planning that is more comprehensive in its treatment of the linkages between planning and governance and helps advance the creation of network power, emancipatory knowledge, empowering subjectivities, and spaces of solidarity. The article then discusses the merits of these insights in the context of a categorization of planning into traditional, democratic, advocacy, and incremental approaches
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