Naming a favela, a villa, or a settlement as informal, subnormal, irregular or at risk is already a way of intervening in that territory: the category decides what history is archived, what intervention is legitimized, and what ways of dwelling are left out of the city’s official narrative. This symposium seeks to treat the urban margins of Latin American cities as a site of theoretical production, and not solely as an object of public policy.<\/p>\n
The discussion of the margins of the state, opened up by Veena Das and Deborah Poole in showing that state illegibility is itself a form of government, and taken up by James Ferguson in thinking of the spatialization of the state as an always incomplete and uneven process, helps us think beyond the categories of informality and periphery through which the Latin American city has historically been read. In these fragments of city without city status, as Maria Cristina Cravino names them, we also find the path traced by Licia Valladares, Mauricio de Abreu or Rafael Soares Gon\u00e7alves in historicizing the very construction of the Rio favela as an object of knowledge. In turn, Cesar Gonzalez, in recent work, calls these territories territories of intersection: zones where temporalities, legalities and ways of dwelling intersect in ways that no administrative category manages to fully capture. <\/p>\n
Our method is the geohistory of Fernand Braudel, which in Alain Musset’s work on Latin American cities becomes a bridge toward the cities that do not yet exist: looking at the long past of a territory in order to imagine, almost as fiction, the city that cannot yet be.<\/p>\n
We call for papers grounded in concrete empirical research — an archive, a cartography, a series of interviews, a neighborhood ethnography — that, from there, contribute to imagining the cities of the future. We are interested in the margins in general, beyond their relationship with the state: popular habitat production, alternatives to the climate crisis conceived from socio-environmental justice, everyday resistances and long-standing urban struggles, new forms of community organization, alliances among neighborhoods, universities and movements, and forms of knowledge produced from the territories themselves and not only about them. We want to read there the tensions between what is intervened upon and what resists, between what the state names and what neighborhoods already know about themselves.
\nThis symposium is inscribed within the spirit of this ICA edition’s theme, “tradition and innovation: the memories of the Americas.” We invite participants to bring their own neighborhoods, their own archives, their own unresolved questions: we want these memories to keep building, already today, the futures of the Latin American city, and with them, an urban theory that speaks from Latin America and not only about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[61],"class_list":["post-10667","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-geografia"],"yoast_head":"\n