Designing Latin America. Spatial Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Design Practices

2017 América Crítica. Vol. 1, n° 2, dicembre 2017 DESIGNING LATIN AMERICA. SPATIAL JUSTICE, SOCIAL HIERARCHY, AND DESIGN PRACTICES ANTONIO DI CAMPLI Università di Camerino DISEÑANDO AMÉRICA LATINA. JUSTICIA ESPACIAL, JERARQUÍA SO- CIAL Y PRÁCTICAS DE DISEÑO. RESUMEN: Este ensayo es un intento de codificación de un que la arquitectura asumió como práctica in- discurso entre algunas experimentaciones de crustada y figura discursiva para el despliegue diseño y planificación urbano latinoamericanas de nuevas estructuras de poder. En este sentido, de los 2000, cuyos lazos disciplinarios forjaron estas reflexiones son un intento de definir la alianzas con estructuras emergentes de gober- respuesta de la arquitectura a la persistente nanza urbana y cuyos medios y fines profesio- condición colonial en estados, ciudades y regio- nales se alinearon implícitamente con narrati- nes de América Latina y el surgimiento de nuevas urbanas postcoloniales. Al excavar las lu- vas formas de diseño y de sus tecnologías de chas de la descolonización alrededor de algunas poder para contrarrestarlas en el contexto de la ciudades latinoamericanas y las crecientes asi- reafirmación del capitalismo neoliberal o de metrías entre la ciudad 'Letrada' e 'Iletrada' que discursos neo-bolivarianos. resultaron, es posible revelar el papel central KEYWORDS: URBANISMO POSCOLONIAL, RESISTENCIA, BANDOLERISMO SOCIAL, CIUDAD LETRADA, PODER This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Antonio di Campli Designing Latin America. Spatial Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Design Practices. 2017 ⎸América Crítica. Vol. 1, n° 2, dicembre 2017: 139-166. DOI: 10.13125/américacrítica/3012 140 ANTONIO DI CAMPLI Introduction This article assembles a narration with sets of projects, statements, narrations, Spatial Justice, Social Hierarchy, and events and figures, the whole of which Power Practices. Designing Latin America is constitutes less an ‘alternative’ history of an attempt to codify a discourse concern- architecture than a history of Latin ing some Latin America’s urban and American discoursive and professional planning design experimentations of the present. In addition, this is not a treatise 2000s. These experimentations have dis- of ‘learning from’, as one may assume ciplinary ties that forged alliances with from the scope of material I draw upon. emergent structures of urban gover- Rather, it insists on the fact that in order nance, as well as professional means and to truly grasp what Latin American ar- ends implicitly aligned with postcolonial chitecture has become today, we need to urban narratives. By excavating the read it through a history of its discour- struggles of decolonization around some sive outlines, disciplinary territories, Latin American cities, and the growing epistemological contours and technical asymmetries between ‘Lettered’ and ‘Un- practices that constitute an entangled lettered’ cities that resulted, it is possible ‘political discourse’. Thus, far from pe- to reveal the central role that architecture ripheral or weird objects to be consumed took on as both practice embedded in, by architectural critic’s centripetal ap- and discursive cypher for the unfolding petite for the exotic, this text identifies of new power structures. In this sense, more of a methodological scope through these reflections are an attempt to define which it is possible to examine how ar- an architecture’s response to the persis- chitecture discovered a political instru- tent colonial condition of states, cities mentality in its entanglements with the and regions across Latin America. More- informal, the peripheral, the banditish, over, they try to define the rise of new 1 and the ‘legally exogenous’ . This discus- forms of design and its power technolo- gies, which are meant to counter these 1 The reference is to how the concept of social latter in the context of the reaffirmation banditry has haunted the Latin American imagi- of neoliberal capitalism or neo-Bolivarian nation. As a cultural trope, banditry has always discourses. been an uneasy compromise between desire and anxiety, and it is possible to isolate three main 2017 América Crítica. Vol. 1, n° 2, dicembre 2017 DESIGNING LATIN AMERICA. SPATIAL JUSTICE, SOCIAL HIERARCHY, AND DESIGN PRACTICES 141 sion is located precisely at the interface public spaces, passing through the rise of between fear and the intrinsic potential mobility infrastructures as devices for re- embodied in ‘unlettered’ urban spaces, duction of spatial fragmentation, and ar- that is territories that are indeed a fertile riving to the experimentations of ‘striat- ground for innovation. As social, eco- ed’ urban spaces. Venezuela, Ecuador, nomic and intellectual frontiers, they Mexico and California are the main loca- seem to be fragments, ’zones of excep- tions of this narration. tion’, well suited for entrepreneurial en- deavors and design experimentations. 1. A fragmented theory However, there is a caveat: if these This first set of reflections is con- threshold areas are ready for innovative cerned with the experimentation of inno- appropriation, they can just as well be vative socio-spatial devices in the context negatively conceived or appropriated. of the Latin American city; a place Therefore, it is not possible to be entirely marked by both class and ethnic frag- optimistic, and it is necessary to remem- mentation, and the presence of vast sys- ber that margins and borders are key tem of thresholds or interfaces articulat- sites where power may reassert its ing relationships between formality and strength (by censoring the Otherness), informality, that is lower class suburban and expands its reach (by filling juridical spaces, spaces of exception, fractures, so- voids). cial condensers and systems of enclaves To tell this story, the text traces an arc along environmental or mobility infra- starting from the invention of hybrid pro- structures. These situations can be seen totypes of multilayered public and semi- as a source of alternative values and vi- sions of everyday life for most southern representational strategies. The first one concerns the bandit as radical other, a figure through Americans. It is in the ‘thresholds’ be- which the elites depicted the threats posed to tween underdevelopment and over re- them by various sectors outside the lettered city. finement that it is possible to look for in- The second one involves the bandit as a trope novative urbanism discourses. The hy- used in elite internecine struggles, where rural pothesis is that it is possible to look at insurgency was a means to legitimize or refute an opposing sector or faction within the lettered city. these situations as fragmented spatial Finally, in certain cases, the bandit was used as an capital, as agents of transformation, and image of the non-state violence that the nation as a support and place of potentiality. state had to suppress as a historical force and si- These systems of thresholds, interfaces multaneously exalt as a memory in order to and fragments can be places of experi- achieve cultural coherence and actual sovereign- ty. mentation of urban mutation, seen as an 2017 América Crítica. Vol. 1, n° 2, dicembre 2017 142 ANTONIO DI CAMPLI alteration after which the urban space Ecuador, ‘Con Lo Que Hay’ (With What might have changed its nature. The re- is Available) is an academic architecture search question is: how is it possible to studio within the Faculty of Architecture make these spaces democratic resources? of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del New design narratives are at stake (di Ecuador, in Quito, for levels seven and Campli 2016). eight as a pre-professional opportunity In the past two decades, a new genera- where students ultimately apply their tion of architects has emerged in Latin academic knowledge along with social America, reinstating a sense of optimism work within a specific community. to the idea that urban designers can, one In the 1980s and 1990s, Medellín was more, make a significative difference in the murder capital of Latin America. the city-making of the so-called global Here, a sequence of mayors, in particular South. Sergio Fajardo, realized new kinds of ur- In Venezuela, the Urban Think-Tank ban open spaces, civic equipments and (U-TT), an office founded by Venezuelan infrastructures that help improving the Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klem- city. However, it was the organization of perer, designed and realized in the bar- the relationships between dwellers, ac- rios of Caracas what they defined as ‘ver- tors and stakeholders to be more radical tical gyms’. These are structures con- than the new buildings and public spa- ceived as a progression of layers corre- ces per se. sponding to a superposition of uses and Along the US-Mexico border, a differ- functions, as well as a set of innovative ent kind of urban designer is at work. urban devices designed to give an ener- Teddy Cruz has theorized the role of the gizing effect in their communities. U-TT activist architect, by marking a form of also designed cable-car systems located design-practice based in the engagement in hillside slums, hence connecting the with the complicated business of policy. informal city to the city centre and im- Some specific elements characterize proving the mobility of Caracas slum these experiences: the design strategies dwellers. In Caracas, the architectural of- pointing out forms of urban transforma- fice Pico Estudio focuses on the defini- tion and densification focused on multi- tion of new urban environments and

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