Latin American Urban Cultural Studies: Unique Texts, Ordinary Cities

Alejandra García Vargas

doi:10.16997/wpcc.178

Abstract

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.

Highlights

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 identify two authors whose publications gained immediate distribution and are recurrently quoted among Latin American communication scholars
Our  call  for  understanding  and  comprehending  ways  of  being  urban  in  ordinary  cities  is  a  response  to  both  a  geographical and disciplinary hierarchy of knowledge about cities

Summary

The Context for Latin American Urban Cultural Studies

Urban  theorists  have  excluded  many  cities  and  their  inhabitants  from  explanations  and  descriptions  of  what  it  means  to  live  in  these  cities,  ignoring  vernacular  terms  used to describe and imagine urban areas and their transformations. The  literature  emerging  from  Latin  America  that  we  discuss  here  coincides  with  a  renewed interest in Western urban theory as a means of understanding the problems  of  advanced  industrialized  cities  within  the  context  of  globalization. The following  quote  from  David  Harvey  (2000,  16),  when  trying  to  explain  the  problems  of  post‐ industrial cities, is indicative: But  all  of  these  problems  of  the  advanced  capitalist  world  pale  into  insignificance  compared  to  the  extraordinary  dilemmas  of  developing  countries,  with  the  wildly  uncontrolled  pace  of  urbanization  in  São  Paulo,  Mexico  City,  Cairo,  Lagos,  Mumbai,  Calcutta,  Seoul,  and    Shanghai  and  Beijing. It came at a time  when Latin American scholars were moving away from arguments about dependency  and underdevelopment while trying to rediscover their voices and ways of imagining  distinctive  urban  futures. They are   unique because they are capable of narrating, imagining and understanding the city in  their  own  terms;  precisely  because  they  uncover  ‘the  poetry  of  our  urban  future’  (Harvey, 2000, 28)

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