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The article analyzes urban policy encompassing two districts originated as informal settlements -Villa 31-31 bis and Rodrigo Bueno- located in the coastal area of Retiro-Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires. The paper presents evidence on the ways in which "planning by means of projects" deploys a consistent "pro-market" strategic perspective based on great tactical flexibility; encourages simultaneous processes of "local production of the global" and revitalization of the informal housing market, both sustained in the privatization of public land; and reinforces inequalities at macro and micro scale. Research involved a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodological strategy, combining data from primary sources (25 semi-structured interviews with different actors, participation in technical boards, tenants survey) and secondary sources (census data and documentary sources). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multidimensional concept of the right to the city involves a pursuit of community and participatory urban experience. This perspective is evident in the theoretical frame but complex in its applicability and translation into concrete facts of everyday life of men and women who live, work and circulate in Latin American cities. This paper aims to make a combination between theory and practice through a case study in a middle range city in the Andean North-Patagonia - Argentina. Strategies as regards participatory patterns, relationships and tensions between local scales (municipality) and neighborhood (neighborhood councils) are been analyzed. Even with its flaws, incipiently, these associations tend to improve the right to the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to claim the problem concerning the digital interrelation tools in order to make a theoretical approximation to the urban spaces. In this sense, we try to make some questions on the roots and rootlessness in a city mediated by digital technology. On the one hand, digital ground drives us towards a configuration of micro-spaces of inmunity and towards a security space of control as well. On the other hand, the saturation of interpellations and stimuli entails the paroxistic acceleration in our digital and urban lives. At the junction between digital urbs, civitas and polis, it is a must a critical reflexion on the way we would like to live in the tomorrows' city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to characterize, for the social-ensemble that negatively defines them, the marginal urban spaces stigmatized in terms of their structuring value. We state that these spaces must be understood according to the system they integrate with pure and neutral spaces. Based on an critical review of the concept of heterotopy, we state that these sites of insignificant relative weight, in the material and political economy of contemporary cities, become essential for their symbolic and affective economy. These spaces accomplish the socially effective --and humanly cruel-- task of setting the lower limits of the urbanensemble, which takes consistency by their sustained expulsion. By embodying the radical exterior of contemporary cities, these spaces also act as the cathartic and projective locus of the collective imagination and passions that, at the same time, feed from them and discharge against them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to emphasize the relevance of analyzing the exchanges between local and foreign counterparts. Latin American cultural history, cultural studies as well as architecture and urbanism histories contribute to discuss dependentists analyses on center--periphery relations. Those research lines enable a more productive approach on international circulation of ideas, technicians and urban models as well as international exchanges. The theoretical approach is articulated with a previous research that analyzes the struggle to define diagnoses of Buenos Aires city problems between 1983 and 1992. Those diagnosis are developed by various networks of local professional and technician, related in multiple ways with Spanish peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the adoption of foreign concepts in Latin-American urban planning and Architecture. We ask about the reasons and the means in which city actors are taking and adapting those theories. Also we point main urban concepts shaping landscapes in XXI century. Mexico city brings us a good example of that process. The main conclusion is about the circulation of ideas with significant changes that allows partial new concepts emerge from the Latin-American reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on urban infrastructure services in Latin America. It analyzes this services as goods produced and distributed collectively, that support the operation (and reproduction) of the urban agglomeration. This paper tries to study the services as part of process of urbanization inside the structural determinations and the particular processes (social and political) that define them. It develops a brief conceptualization of urban services in capitalist urbanization in general and in Latin America, introducing the issue of guidance, in two phases of capitalism, Keynesianism, welfare and neoliberal restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the modalities and possibilities to apply the term gentrification in the context of Latin-American cities. For this purpose, it is crucial to develop a critical exercise that dissociates the term from the traditional debates arising from the Anglophone world. As a result of this dialectical process, we propose its application in two dimensions for which it appears to have a particular relevance: the gentrification by real estate agents and the interrelation between gentrification and neighbourhood struggles. These are the two aspects we consider appropriate to reveal the hidden consequences of contemporary urban policies and to re-politicise urban studies from a perspective that is related to the demands of citizens. Such critical reflection leads us to a conceptual proposition that is latter exemplified by the case of Santiago, Chile, a paradigmatic city for the application of neoliberal urban policies causing gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses four decades of public initiatives to recover the historic center of Bahia, with its approaches, intervention models and changing emphasis: tourism, political marketing. We expose the old center’s historical process of decay and underscore the lack of sustainability of the programs carried out since 1991. Also, we evidence the double process of evicting marginal population and the housing function of the historic center; and the reappropriation of the place by many Afro-Brazilian groups. In conclusion we criticize imported models of intervention and plead for the development of a Latin-American theory about the requalification of our historic centers, and for searching new solutions based upon our specificities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary interest of the present paper is to reflect about the transformations in modem society and their effect on the daily dynamics of the city and in the practices of the people who inhabit it. Our reflections are centered particularly on Mexico City and in the youths who live there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]