Urban Palimpsests, Local Knowledge, Planning, and Territorial Disputes in Latin America
This symposium calls on researchers in architecture, urbanism, geography, and related disciplines to examine the evolution of Latin American territory as a social production in dispute, tracing the continuities and ruptures between original forms of settlement and formal urban planning practices. Under the themes of the 59th ICA on socio-environmental crisis and historical memory, this space proposes to critically analyze how contemporary land-use planning exercises respond to, collide with, or adapt to the challenges of a regenerative future. To this end, the long transhistorical trajectory of the region will be addressed, from the complex ecological and territorial logics of the earliest pre-Hispanic settlements –visible in Chiribiquete, Ciudad Perdida, or Betoma– to the dizzying contemporary phenomena of metropolization, megapolization, and metapolization. The past, ever present, operates here as a structural palimpsest in which formal planning is constantly challenged by the persistence of historical inequalities, governance tensions, and cartographies of popular or ancestral rootedness in land management.
In the face of climate change and unsustainable exploitation, papers that problematize the gap between normative-institutional design and the realities of rurality and accelerated urbanization are of interest. Preference will be given to approaches that promote critical discussion on the forms or processes of territorial occupation and planning instruments in the Global South, driving forward alternatives for socio-spatial justice and resilience that regenerate the vital connections between nature and American societies.
