Frank Müller and Anke Schwarz
The editorial team of CROLAR – Critical Reviews on Latin American
Research – is pleased to present its fourth volume, “Lo Urbano”.
As the title indicates, “the urban” and urban phenomena in and
from Latin America are in the focus of this volume. As a place of
anonymous cohabitation and social diversity (Simmel 1903), as a
sphere of capitalist reproduction and collective consumption
(Castells 1974), from the imaginarios urbanos (García
Canclini 1996) to the “Rebel Cities” (Harvey 2012) the city has
inspired systematic analysis of the tight linkages between public
space and collective culture, between space and capital
accumulation, and of social discontent.
Today, Latin America is at once the most urbanized continent and
home to the most striking social inequalities. Since the 1960s,
private and public research on these topics has increased and
regional governments have reacted by installing urban planning
authorities. The long interdisciplinary tradition of Urban Studies
in Latin America has predominantly focused on issues such as
(extreme) poverty, segregation, insecurity, and violence. And yet,
a questioning of the specificity of Latin American cities has only
recently begun and with it a debate on the universality of
urbanization processes, theories, and methodologies. What is more,
beyond the dystopic image that generalizes peripheral “slums” to
be an essential characteristic of the continent’s major cities,
Urban Studies in and from Latin America increasingly access the
potential and plurality of urbanization processes and approaches
for their analyses.
Hence the question that drives the Focus section of
CROLAR’s current volume: With respect to “the urban”, what can and
has been learned from Latin America? We found several overlapping
topics and lines of inquiry in current research in and from Latin
America: (1) an interest in the translatability and mobility of
concepts and methods and, connected to this, the question of
hierarchies in knowledge production, which undermine global
horizontal exchanges; (2) a persistent focus on how urban space is
appropriated not only materially, but also on a symbolic level;
(3) an opening-up towards the study of fragmented political
sovereignties in the management and distribution of resources; (4)
new methods for the analysis of urban segregation; (5) promising
critical approaches to the long- lasting debate on urban
informality; and (6) how commodification of cultural diversity and
cultural expressions transform the space of America’s cities.
CROLAR 4 traces these topics from Tim Edensor’s and Mark Jayne’s
Urban Theories Beyond the West; to Anne Huffschmid’s and
Kathrin Wilder’s translation of Latin American approaches and
concepts such as territories, public space, and imaginarios;
and Gisela Heffes’ Utopías urbanas. Geopolíticas del deseo en
América Latina. Paola Alfaro d’Alençon et al.’s anthology
Lateinamerikanische Städte im Wandel also addresses the
question of the geography of knowledge production.
The production of (urban) space is conceptualized from various
angles in several publications reviewed in this journal: the
(literal) writing of space in Vivane Mahieux’ Urban
Chroniclers in Modern Latin America, its making through
policing in Markus-Michael Müller’s Public Security in the
Negotiated State, and the spatial embeddedness of urban (and
rural) movements of social resistance in Raúl Zibechi’s Territorien
des Widerstands. Using the example of a public university in
Rio de Janeiro, André Cicalo’s Urban Encounters examines
how differentiation along categories such as “race” is inscribed
in and reproduced through urban space – and how it can be altered
by affirmative action. Horacio Torres y los mapas sociales by
Artemio Pedro Abba et al. presents the work of one of the key
urban thinkers on socio-spatial structuring in Buenos Aires and
his theoretical conceptualization of urban space.
Undoubtedly, urban fragmentation, residential segregation, and
socio-spatial differentiation are “classic” topics in Urban
Studies in and from Latin America. The current state of research
is represented in compilations edited by Emilio Pradilla Cobos,
Thomas Maloutas and Kuniko Fujita, and by Eduardo Cesar Leão
Marques’ study of São Paulo. Taking a more general perspective, Desarrollo
Urbano y Regional [Series: Los grandes problemas de México]
by Gustavo Garza and Martha Schteingart compiles a variety of
studies on contemporary processes of inter- and intra-urban
development.
Urban informality – a concept “born” in Kenya, which traveled via
the urban South and North back to Latin America – has been a major
concern for planning authorities and researchers for more than
four decades. The publications by Felipe Hernández et al. and
Janice Perlman are re-reading urban informalities in Latin America
by broadening the concept’s scope from its tight link to
marginality to questions of empowerment and post-structural
explanations. Partially related to these debates, metroZones’
anthology Urban Prayers centers on the rarely-studied
relation between politics, religion and urban space, covering
religious urban movements in the peripheries of Latin American,
African, Asian, and European cities.
How cultural diversity and ethnicity work in urban politics,
regeneration policies, and imaginaries motivates the volume Selling
EthniCity edited by Olaf Kaltmeier, as well as John T.
Way’s The Mayan in the Mall. Here, the commodification of
cultural expressions, as well as a strategic essentialization of
ethnicity deployed by movements of resistance to urban
displacement are discussed. Arlene Dávila’s Culture Works broadly
discusses the concept of “neoliberalism”. Despite the pitfalls of
an excessive and imprecise analytic use of the term, the author
successfully demonstrates its usefulness in criticizing uneven
effects of cultural and urban policies reshaped by neoliberal
economic logics. Treating similar uneven effects, an omnibus
review of three publications by Rebecca E. Biron, Richard Young
and Amanda Holmes, and Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar
deals with the links between art, culture and the urban in Latin
America.
Anne Huffschmid dedicates the Classics Revisited section
to the eponymous concept of “Lo Urbano”, which stems from the work
of Manuel Delgado. In his conceptualization of Street
Anthropology, the urban is defined through public actions, as
“city in practice” – not to be confused with “the city”. Delgado
proposes a set of particular empirical methods to grasp these
urban practices: first and foremost through direct observation.
Similar to the Lefebvrian tradition, urban space is thus produced
through its use and appropriation. Delgado’s reading of the Right
to the City as a Right to Indifference – to be treated as common,
as same, as equal – also seems rather refreshing in a world of
identity politics and is reminiscent of Simmel’s notion of the “blasé
attitude”.
With a review of Pedro Moctezuma’s La Chispa the section
Interventions is devoted to an account of the “city as
practice”. The grassroots activist and researcher provides
a most detailed insight into the surge and achievements of Mexico
City’s Movimiento Urbano Popular over the last three
decades. Recounting local experiences, practices, and strategies
of political activism and organization, this book is less of a
hands- on manual for social movements, but highly recommended for
all who are susceptible to the spark of confidence in social
struggle.
In Current Debates the present volume of CROLAR assembles
three publications, which make important contributions to their
respective fields, even though they are not directly linked to the
urban: using the examples of Ecuador and Peru, Mobilizing
Ethnic Identity in the Andes by Lisa M. Glidden elaborates
how the construction of ethnic identities is employed as a
strategy of collective representation within and beyond national
constraints. In another contribution to Political Science, Edward
Gibson’s Boundary Control provides a comparative
historical analysis of the way subnational autocratic regimes
operate within federal states in the Americas. Literary production
in post-dictatorship Argentina – the so-called “New Argentine
Narrative” – is the subject of Elsa Drucaroff’s widely received Los
prisioneros de la torre. The book is both an overview and
criticism of young Argentine literature, and a political statement
on the role of literature, writers, and critics in processes of
social change.
All in all, the anthologies and monographs reviewed in CROLAR 4
contribute to a broad field of knowledge production, which is not
only transdisciplinary, but also transnational. An analysis of “Lo
Urbano” in particular cannot be reduced to cities in Latin
America. Beyond the geographic essentialism of a “Latin American”
specificity, the contributions to the present volume provide
critical perspectives on related processes in cities all over the
Americas and the urban South. In doing so, they strive to overcome
hierarchies of knowledge production. As this volume demonstrates,
the very production of the urban – be it through everyday
practices, chronicles, policing, or social resistance – provides
the focal point for many of these works.
In this sense, Urban Studies bear the potential to transcend the boundaries of Area Studies and to focus on the social, political, and economic processes that produce and connect (urban) spaces around the globe. We hope to inspire further attempts to relocate and translate concepts and methods between and within geographical regions.
We wish you a pleasant and inspiring read.