Writing the Latin American city: Trajectories of urban scholarship

Scholarship on urban Latin America is prolific and multifaceted. The region not only is the most urbanised in the world but also the most unequal. This distinctive feature makes it rich and relevant for urban theory-making. This essay introduces a Virtual Special Issue (VSI) on urban studies in Latin America that showcases a selection of articles from the journal’s archives from the mid-1970s to the present. It aims to locate urban studies scholarship in/about the region in the context of democratisation struggles and their urban implications. On the one hand, it traces the intellectual trajectories of some key urban debates bringing attention to their disciplinary, methodological and theoretical underpinnings. The VSI identifies four well-established strands: (1) Disputes around local governance; (2) Anatomy of uneven urbanisation; (3) Housing provision landscapes and infrastructural assemblages; and (4) Economic geographies and variegated gentrifications. On the other hand, it delineates a broad picture of the emergent debates and thematic, methodological and geographical absences in the pages of this journal. Through this analysis, the editorial concludes by identifying some potentially productive future directions for research

Storytelling otherwise: Decolonising storytelling in planning

This article argues that the role of storytelling in planning needs to be rethought learning from the decolonial turn in social sciences. I ask how to decolonise storytelling in planning theory and practice. The aim is to explore how key notions from Latin American decolonial thinking, such as pluriverse, epistemological disobedience, border thinking and sentipensar, can help us to reframe storytelling in planning. This reframing can contribute to finding different avenues to build ontological relationality in a framework of epistemological justice and healing to bring about new imaginations for shaping urban planning otherwise

Cultivating Urban Storytellers: A Radical Co-Creation to Enact Cognitive Justice for/in Self-Built Neighbourhoods

We all carry an imperative to imagining collectively more just cities, to engaging more meaningfully with multiple urban actors and their different sensibilities through their stories. Storytelling helps to foster empathy, to understand the meaning of complex experiences, and, most importantly, to inspire action. With the rise of the digital era and new technologies at hand, we have an opportunity to redefine not only the way we tell, connect, and engage with our collective stories, but also how we work together in forming them. Based on the research design project Patrimonio Vivo | Living Heritage, grounded in the city of Medellín, this article illustrates the dynamics and potentials of co-creation with cultural organizations and creative teams through learning alliances. Our alliance among a cultural community centre, a cooperative of architects, a grassroot organisation and post-graduate students around the world used storytelling to propel an ecology of urban knowledges. Working online during the global lockdown, we mobilised stories of solidarity, care, memory, and livelihoods through the narrative of people, places, and organisations following their trajectories as the basis for the design of spatial strategies. This collaborative work aimed at contributing to the recognition of everyday spatial practices in self-built neighbourhoods as a form of “living heritage” of the city and a key building block for reframing a more progressive “integral neighbourhood upgrading” practice. I argue that using storytelling as a co-creative methodology, based on learning alliances, we can bridge the ecology of urban knowledges to foster cognitive justice and transform the current stigmatizing urban narrative of self-built neighbourhoods

Crystalising Decolonial Praxis: Minga and Convite as City Making Otherwise

While decolonial debates are mushrooming in humanities and social science, the field of urban design still needs to uncover the territorial manifestations of decolonial practices to reframe its own disciplinary premises. Engaging with space co-production in Latin America urges us to learn from the long-term spatial practices of solidarity and self-management that gave rise to popular neighbourhoods. This essay offers a joint reflection on two Latin American city-making practices from a decolonial lens. Drawing on our research on the urban legacy of the Andean minga and the Colombian convite in shaping the cities of Quito and Medellín respectively, we analyse their organising principles, plural uses, potentials, and the risks of co-optation. To spatially visualise the impacts that multiple mingas had in shaping urban space, the case of Comité del Pueblo in Quito will be introduced. While for Medellín we will use the case of the trajectory of the neighbourhood of Moravia. We argue that mingas and convites have shaped cities and crystalise decolonial ways of knowing, planning and (re) producing space

El matrimonio igualitario en Colombia : un diálogo con la convencionalidad

El objeto de esta investigación es determinar si el Estado colombiano, a través de sus diferentes operadores jurídicos, realizó un adecuado control de convencionalidad, al momento de definir si las parejas del mismo sexo tenían o no derecho a contraer nupcias. Para tal efecto, se expone la evolución que tuvo el reconocimiento de los derechos de los homosexuales en su ámbito individual y de pareja, así como también en el campo del matrimonio igualitario, análisis que se realiza tanto en el sistema colombiano, como en el interamericano. Finalmente, se hace un ejercicio descriptivo y analítico, para constatar si Colombia realizó una adecuada interpretación de las normas y principios de índole convencional, en las oportunidades en las que tuvo que pronunciarse sobre el derecho de las parejas gais a casarse.The subject of this investigation, is determine whether the Colombian Government through its different legal operators, performed a “conventionality control” at the time of define either the same-sex couples had or non-rights to married. To this end, will show the development of the gays rights recognition both individual and relationship scopes in the Colombian and Interamerican legal system and Thereafter the same analysis will be carried out with regard of equality marriage. Finally, an analytical and descriptive exercise it shall be done to establish if Colombia perform made an adequate interpretations of rules, conventional treaty principles, in the opportunities which had to rule about the right of the same-sex couples to married, in order to establish whether the Colombia state could be internationally responsible or by contrast will exceed the “Concentrated Conventionality Control” at present.MaestríaMagíster en Derecho del Estado con énfasis en Derecho Públic

CRITICAL URBAN PEDAGOGY: Convites as Sites of Southern Urbanism, Solidarity Construction and Urban Learning

Learning from the pedagogical potentials of Southern city-making practices is imperative to foster emancipatory urban learning settings. However, the ways in which urban learning spaces beyond professional settings operate and how Southern urbanism practices constitute new critical pedagogies are poorly understood. We draw on research about urban learning on ‘slum upgrading’ in the city of Medellín (Colombia), a benchmark in dealing in tandem with informality and urban violence, to analyze the pedagogical potentials of convites. Convites are an essential sociospatial mechanism of self-build settlements rooted in solidarity networks that initiate collective action and celebration through public cooking. This practice of makeshift community kitchens led by women became the backbone of the response to the scarcities caused by the pandemic in self-built neighborhoods in Latin America. In this article we ask what Southern urbanism and critical pedagogy can learn from convites. We then analyze the ways in which convites combine community kitchens as learning environments, the use of collective storytelling as a learning device, and collective action through networked solidarities. We argue that critical urban pedagogy is a situated pedagogy derived from everyday relations of place, body and materiality infused by memory and articulated by storytelling

Territorial healing: A spatial spiral weaving transformative reparation

This article introduces the concept of territorial healing as a strategy for holistic intervention with communities affected by violence-related trauma. Violence exerted in places generates affective and territorial ruptures contained in socio-emotional wounds and disruptions in the social and institutional fabric that weakens collective life. Building on post/in-conflict cities studies, peacebuilding studies, and a decolonial approach, we argue that territorial healing agglutinates myriad interventions aimed at a collective restorative reparation of geo-traumas (Pain, 2021) and promotes the construction of collective subjects for decision-making in territorial processes. The article highlights the need to go beyond the local/spatial turn of peacebuilding and reparative planning by providing a more robust understanding of how to frame the political project of reparative justice in urban spaces and across different scales. Territorial healing processes go beyond institutionalized frameworks to involve decentralized and autonomous processes that expand the spatiality of the symbolic, corporeal and emotions of collective urban life. This article suggests that a territorial healing trajectory requires weaving the mapping of body-territory-earth (Cabnal, 2019), collective memory, and spatial imagination as a strategy to manage existing conflicts through therapeutic dialogue and the shaping of reparative infrastructures

Decálogo para el Mejoramiento Integral de Barrios en Tiempos de Pandemia- Hoja de Ruta para Latinoamérica y el Caribe

La pandemia obliga a recalibrar las prioridades de la política pública urbana y de vivienda. La pandemia se revela como una extensión y amplificación de los múltiples sistemas que sostienen la inequidad territorial, y trae a la superficie la crisis de vivienda existente. Se nos ha confirmado que el impacto de la pandemia se sufre de manera desproporcionada en los barrios populares. De la atención de la emergencia debemos pasar a la acción estratégica exponencial y sostenida. Para lograrlo, se requiere inteligencia colectiva y decisión política. Enfrentar la pandemia hace crucial el aprendizaje entre organizaciones y la promoción de alianzas estratégicas para proteger y cuidar la vida de toda la población y, sobre todo, los expuestos a una vulnerabilidad estructural. La complejidad, escala y velocidad de los efectos de la pandemia en la vida requieren una coordinación interactoral a múltiples escalas sin precedentes. Por ello, surge la iniciativa denominada “Sinergias para la solidaridad”, que generó un mapeo de iniciativas de la sociedad civil frente a la COVID-19 en barrios populares, facilitó el intercambio para imaginar colectivamente un futuro pos-pandemia más justo y ayudó a generar una coalición entre organizaciones de la sociedad civil, movimientos sociales, universidades, centros de investigación y redes internacionales y regionales. En esta coalición nos juntamos en primera instancia para responder a la pregunta ¿cuál el Mejoramiento Integral de Barrios que necesitamos en tiempos de pandemia y recuperación? Este trabajo colaborativo resultó en la definición de un decálogo que propone una hoja de ruta para la región. Con base en este trabajo colaborativo, argumento que es imperativo estructurar una acción coordinada, efectiva y a escala que articule la política de salud pública con la de desarrollo urbano poniendo en el centro el Mejoramiento Integral de Barrios Saludables. Focalizar la acción pública en los barrios populares permite combatir la pandemia y el cambio climático y es clave para promover la recuperación económica con equidad