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
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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