Call for Papers | Assembling the Contemporary Latin American City

For those of you interested in emerging and alternative approaches to urban planning in Latin American cities, there is still a week left to submit an abstract for a Call for Papers by the Latin American Studies Association Congress 2014.

The panel is comprised by four urban planning experts from renowned universities and includes our colleague Catalina Ortiz from Universidad Nacional de Colombia, with which we collaborated on this year’s workshop in Medellín.

This call for papers aims to explore and craft new concepts and approaches in Latin American urban studies and planning and analyze how contemporary Latin American cities are assembled and mobilized. Read the full abstract below or click here.

Paper abstracts of 250 words or less should be sent to the panel organizers (listed below) by August 28, 2013.

Abstract:

In the wake of structural adjustment programs and region-wide reforms to democratize and decentralize central government authority, several Latin American cities became sites of increased experimentation and innovation in urban planning, urban development and public participation. Municipal authorities throughout the region reinvented land use, transportation, housing, and public space as planning tools to address a range of new and long-deferred infrastructural, social, and environmental issues. In this context, urban planning became a highly contentious and experimental arena where a range of actors – from public sector planners to NGOs to social movements to organized private actors – seized opportunities to push and legitimize new models of urban planning and development. Although North-South policy exchanges and circuits persisted, Latin Americans increasingly began to look at cities in the region as legitimate and alternative models beyond North-originated paradigms.

We think that the increased South-South urban exchanges in Latin America as well as the new ideological alignments and urban experiments in the region (Davis 2013, Goldfrank and Schrank 2009, Baiocchi 2005) offer a platform to explore and craft new concepts and approaches in Latin American urban studies and planning. In recent years, urban scholars in a variety of disciplines have highlighted the potential of relational approaches to theorize cities, policy, and planning including assemblage and actor-network theory (Farías and Bender 2009, McFarlane 2012), urban policy mobilities (Peck and Theodore 2010, McCann and Ward 2011), inter-city referencing (Ong and Roy 2011), and transnational planning exchanges (Watson 2009, Healey 2013). This panel seeks contributors that engage with those debates by analyzing how contemporary Latin American cities are assembled and mobilized. Papers should touch on some or all of the following questions: How and by whom is a Latin American urban policy model assembled and/or mobilized? How are South-South circulations related to Northern circuits of power and legitimacy? Are Latin American urban models counter-hegemonic? Who are the new actors and experts in Latin American urban policy and planning and where do their power and legitimacy reside?