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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 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]