City(ies) of the Global South and Contemporaneity: Other Epistemologies for a New Era?
The city presents itself as a strategic device that articulates a historical matrix with the multiplicity of contemporary elements. In a process characterized by a policy of commodification determined by the logic of neoliberal urbanism, we observe a time of transition in the consciousness of new eras, such as the Anthropocene and the digital age, in which possibilities for a transition to a post-human world emerge, in which the city and the territory, public space and social practices, architecture and everyday aesthetics face what appears to be the end of a cycle, giving way to a different state. We find ourselves in the context of a city migrating from supposedly stabilized paradigms to others that remain undetermined. We face transitions toward territorialities that mobilize meanings, contents, and subjectivities that result in spaces (and times) that are constantly expanded and reconfigured, questioning the dimensions of the (re)production of urban space. We inhabit cities that result from plural interconnections and crossings between their historical matrix and the unfolding of global policies expressing unprecedented forms of contemporaneity. The planetarization of processes, which shapes everyday life in a differentiated sociocultural context, configures micro-geographies of a dense everyday life and new uses and appropriations of space.
In a time of scalar rupture, in which the spatio-temporal references generated by social relations are expressed in the problem of city-territory continuity, we observe: on the one hand, urban territorialities that define new spatialities and promote alternative interpretations of a globalized culture that tend to become homogenized in an urbanism compatible with flexible forms of capital accumulation; and, on the other hand, territories that cease to be the natural counterpart confronting the urban artifice, becoming instead the support of a diffuse and expansive city, an expression of its logics of submission and control. In countries with rich identities and shared imaginaries, this scalar rupture finds a sense of belonging in the conflictive singularity of everyday life. Latin America, sheltered under the generic concept of the Global South, can be understood through the immensity of its territory, the urgencies of its people, and the dramatic-utopian encounter between the geographic and the human. The green ocean of the Amazon, the dorsal skeleton of the Andes, and the Patagonian steppe constitute a territory thought of, until now, more as an inexhaustible resource than as a delicate support for life (human and non-human). If abundance seems to have defined this territory, emergencies manifest themselves in its cities, conditioned by the extremes of market pragmatism, privatopia, and elitism, and by the precariousness and vulnerability of social sectors. This symposium turns to research on processes and manifestations of urbanity in the Global South, with particular — though not exclusive — attention to Latin American cities, which, by revaluing centuries of hybridization between the ancestral and the current, contribute to the debate in the field of architecture and urbanism. It proposes to reflect on the spatio-temporal processes of the Global South, not as recipients of global conditioning, but as producers of their own epistemology, capable of engaging in debate about the post-human horizon toward which contemporaneity seems to be propelling us.
