Culture and Politics in the "Latin American" City

Abstract

The contemporary human condition is urban. The majority of Latin Americans reside in urban areas; cities make a disproportionate contribution economic well-being and are increasingly understood as the incubators of innovation, as well as the strategic arenas for citizenship and the principal influences on consumption. More than physical locations, cities are windows into every aspect of the human condition such that, as Ed Soja has claimed, to an increasing degree we are all urbanists (2003, 269). Embracing the positive possibilities of such a claim, however, is constrained by the narrow field of vision offered by scholars of the Latin American city. The dominant optic is write about cities through representations of familiar urban spaces, a reliance on established categorizations of human agency (the informal sector being perhaps the most pervasive), and on framing narratives through concerns for reform and planning. Few attempts consider how the meanings