The socio-spatial grid of Latin American cities is marked by a history of political and cultural domination and economic exploitation as a legacy of European imperialism and colonization. Studies of segregation, fragmentation, displacement, migration and marginalization in Latin American cities thus have to take into account the long history of spatially inscribed social, ethnical, racial and gendered inequalities. Yet this colonial legacy does not legitimate essentialist characterizations of “the” Latin American City. Instead, the development of cities and their socio-political, -economic and -cultural phenomena should better be framed as relational, that is, as developments entangled to urbanization processes in other world regions. The study of urbanity, due to its spatial focus, allows localizing global connections as well as contributing to global theories and their spatial assumptions by empirical case studies.
Against this background, transnational urban studies de-center, first, the space and position of theory building and its dominant localization in Western Academia, and second, through case studies in cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America, widen the empirical ground and generate an understanding of unequal urbanization processes. The workshop´s aim is to link theory and methodology as two dimensions of inequality and explore on the question how they are interdependently related. By drawing on empirical studies on diverse phenomena and social spaces in Havana, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Medellín, among others, it is not the workshop’s aim to conclude into a general theory of Latin American Urbanism, but to discuss academic vocabulary and method(olog)ical approaches for the study of urban space.
Workshop organized by the working group Urbanidades Desde América Latina (UDAL) and desiguALdades.net, September 13, 2012, Berlin
