Latin American Urban Studies in Dialogue. Urban Knowledge Production from the Region.

Overview

The world is turning urban – and it is in cities that we need to find answers to the challenges that this wholesale urban transformation of our planet and society brings about. Yet apart from urgent action, the complexity of the matter also requires working on a common language for the perception and interpretation of the processes involved – since only what we are able to see and describe together can serve as the starting point of any empowerment to act also together. This is the objective of a global, ordinary urban theory (Robinson 2006, Robinson and Roy 2016), a theory of the city that attempts to develop meaningful ways to see and interpret our changing world from the ‘ordinary’ everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ cities, in order to investigate global urban transformations from multiple perspectives and to develop suitable, location-specific as well as communally valid approaches to formulate both criticism and possible solutions. The research project and international conference series aim to contribute to such a (re)invention of concepts from a specific Latin American perspective and/or by building up from specific Latin American urban experiences. This, secondly, is also to challenge the emerging theorization of the urban “from the South”, as we are realising that much of such southern theorizing is still actually channelled through persisting colonial relationships. The rich body of Latin American work is therefore often left aside in research endeavours initiated in the English but also German speaking academic world (for a critical account see Varley 2013).