Creative Spaces: Urban Culture and Marginality in Latin America

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2011

Urban communication research in Latin America is not just responding to, or rejecting, Western perspectives but producing material that can be valuable for understanding arguments about ordinary cities within the context of globalisation. We interrogate current frameworks in urban cultural studies and communication theory to highlight how research in Latin America provide new possibilities for exchange and dialogues into an area of study that is often missing or limited in Western urban cultural analysis. We argue that this research moves away from theories that deemed Latin American cities as underdeveloped or unequally inserted in to the network of global cities by providing ways of narrating, imagining and understanding the city in their own terms. This research however does not go unchallenged; we also argue that Latin American capital cities are often privileged at the cost of forgetting, ignoring or just describing as traditional other Latin American cities in the region.

Urban People / Lidé města, 2018

The so-called Zona Norte on the outskirts of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the south of México represents a typical “poverty belt” described in the literature on Latin American favelas and slums. An area densely populated by Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking people, migrants from the rural communities from the surrounding highlands, Zona Norte is, in many ways, a typical example of an informal urban settlement, and it bears the stigma usually attached to these places – a lawless, dangerous, no-go zone. The aim of this article is to present three different examples of how this territorial stigmatisation (Wacquant 2008) is experienced, lived, reconstructed, and deconstructed by three generations of inhabitants in Zona Norte. Central to all the stories is the metaphor of “invisibility” or the “invisible city”, which is analysed using concepts from current anthropological literature on urban informality. The article is based on an extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in San Cristóbal de Las Casas between the years 2008 – 2015.

Co-production and public space. Perspectives and experiences from Latin American informal neighbourhoods, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted without the express written consent of the authors. However, we would encourage the use of this material for academic and practical purposes, as long as due recognition of the source is acknowledged. The views and opinions expressed in the essays are those of the authors supporting publishers. cooperation agency VLIR-UOS as part of a collaboration between KU

Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2024

This study explores the role of ‘The Pobladores’ Carnival’ in Santiago, Chile, as a platform for collective action. It investigates the historical and social role of artistic-cultural practices in mobilizing urban poor settlers and their contribution to transforming and negotiating urban space. Using qualitative and ethnographic data from in-depth interviews, participant observation, and documentary sources, the study examines ‘carnivalization,’ its historical development in Chile, and its role in urban cultural struggles. The findings highlight how creativity and cultural practices renegotiate urban inequality, rearticulate urban periphery actors, and promote the Right to the City.

Third International Conference of Young Urban Researchers, 2018

The city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) has various socially and historically marginalized regions lacking cultural and leisure facilities. Within its context of immense social inequalities, many of its urban voids and formerly degraded areas have been planned in line with the global trend of spectacular architectural and urban projects in vogue since the 1980s. Like in the USA or Eastern Europe, these projects are concentrated in regions perceived as strategic to the real estate market and/or cultural tourism, disregarding the places where the demands and needs are latent, such as the favelas (local slums) and the peripheral lower-class neighborhoods. It is in these places, relegated by the public policies and the private capital, that we have observed new ways of thinking and occupying the urban space. We speak of improvised, often temporary actions that represent alternatives to the more formal enterprises that seek mainly the creation of salable urban images. These initiatives usually emerge from collectives of artists or associations of younger people seen as (sub)cultural groups, who carry on cultural interventions in the existing "gaps" of the public space – underneath viaducts, in hidden alleys, or even in abandoned/empty sites. Examples of these interventions are diverse: blind girdles or building walls turned into movie screens and open-air cinemas; former dumpsites in turned into urban parks with award winning design; concrete slabs turned into theater stages; sites of demolition and eviction turned into resistance museums and so on. In Rio de Janeiro, these interventions are rarely the result of traditional urban projects and often represent bottom-up solutions that reflect the need of the inhabitants of poorer areas to transgress beyond the idea of scarcity surrounding them and focus on the notion of potency in places still unexplored. These actors are able to see opportunities and possibilities where others cannot in a tactical manner. Their diverse means of appropriating certain hidden places through art and culture also generate a transformation in the uses of spaces, which is representative of the contemporary era where functions are no longer strictly separated, but mixed. Ergo, in today’s reality, the road infrastructure of a peripheral neighborhood can become a temporary cultural center and a bicycle can become an itinerary library in a favela, breaking the strict division of key functions imposed by the strong modernist inheritance still so strong in Brazil, as well as in other countries. In our research, we refer to these examples of fluid appropriation and transformation of uses as “unusual spaces” (“espaços insólitos” in Portuguese). We propose to present this new object of study at this conference through mappings and reflections based upon the theoretical works of authors such as Michel de Certeau (about strategy and tactics), Milton Santos (about space-time relations), Franck & Stevens (about loose spaces), amongst others.

Chapter in Book: Researching the Contemporary City: Identitity, Envirnment and Social Inclusion in Developing Urban Areas, 2013

Open spaces and housing in informal settlements are largely produced and transformed by the users – the people themselves. But by contrast with housing, there is limited information and understanding about open space processes. This chapter examines these spaces in terms of how they are designed, built, managed, transformed and sustained, along with the role of locals and other actors. Using data from two case study barrios in Bogotá, the production of informal urban space is explored. ‘Informal settlements are by definition unfinished projects in which the agency and creativity of the occupant-builders is central’ (Kellett, 2008: 11). Kellett sums up two characteristics of these settlements: first, the production of space in these settlements is a permanent transformation process; and secondly, the involvement of local people is crucial in this production. The production of informal space is largely steered by the people. Lefebrve (1991: 286) argues that ‘space is permeated with social relations; it is not only supported by social relations but it is also producing and produced by social relations.’ Therefore ‘social space “incorporates” social actions, the actions of subjects both individual and collective who are born and who die, who suffer and who act’ (ibid.: 3). But the production of space is also mediated by consumption, as according to Harvey (1996) production and consumption processes work in a dialectical relationship. Therefore, production and consumption are part of the same spatial transformation process. Low (1996) argues that the social production of space includes more than social actions, but also economic, ideological, and technological expressions that affect the physical creation of the material setting. Harvey (1996: 21) goes further and argues that there is a reciprocal relationship between production and product; however, he advises that ‘we should focus on processes rather than things and we should think of things as products of processes’. In the same respect Lefebvre (1991: 36) states: ‘If space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production.’ It can be argued, therefore, that the production, consumption and product of social space can be seen as interconnected elements, each being the consequence of the other (and vice-versa), all within a social, economic, ideological and technological context. Open spaces in the barrios exemplify these inter-relationships, and the chapter aims to focus on one of these elements, the production of space, however the two other interconnected elements must be kept in mind and will be referred to when necessary.

Architectural Design, 2011

Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 2017

The world economy has detonated processes of re-territorialization in Latin American cities to favor their aspirations to be distinguished as global cities. The economical dynamics of globalization emerging from their public politics have increased social inequalities having their manifestations on one hand, in economical polarization of the urban area and on the other, in the gentrification and increasing social segmentation and fragmentation of the urban area. The result has been a new, socio-economically and culturally shattered geography of centrality and marginality with frictions between them having their manifestations in ourbreaks of contesting non-institutional creative and artistic practices of local communities and urban tribes, among them projects of art in the street and street art. These creative practices have been used by local urban communities as manifestations of civil resistance to denounce their marginalized situation and to demand major visibility in local publ...

Planning Perspectives, 2015

Untamed Urbanisms. Ed. Adriana Allen, Andrea Lampis and Mark Swilling, 2015