Designing Latin America. Spatial justice, social hierarchy, and power practices

Abstract

Designing Latin America. Spatial Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Power Practices is an attempt to the codification of a discourse among some Latin America urban design and planning design experimentations of the 2000’s, whose disciplinary ties forged alliances with emergent structures of urban governance and whose professional means and ends implicitly aligned with postcolonial urban narratives. By excavating the struggles of decolonization around some Latin American cities and the growing asymmetries between the ‘Lettered’ and the ‘Unlettered’ city that resulted, it is possible to reveal the central role that architecture took on as both practice embedded in and discursive cypher for the unfolding of new power structures. In this sense, these reflections are an attempt to define an architecture’s response to the persistent colonial condition in states, cities and regions across Latin America and the rise of new forms of design and its power technologies meant to counter these in the context of the reaffirmation of neoliberal capitalism or neo-Bolivarian discourses.