Destabilize, deprogram, deform: peripherical aesthetics as design paths in Latin American cities

Abstract

This paper is a critical reflection about urban planning and design based on Latin American artworks and practices, dating from the last two decades. It addresses a discussion on peripheralization as a territorial process and an aesthetic production. We put in dialogue works by Cuban artist Ernesto Oroza, Mexican artist Héctor Zamora and Chilean architects group Elemental. These are experiences based on the informal aesthetics of the peripheries, in which time emerges as protagonist, as an agent of transformation and provocateur of other sensibilities and urban logics. Our guiding question is: what dislocations do these aesthetic experiences cause in the urban design and planning? We aim to problematize urban design from its temporal dimension, in order to summon new tools to think about our contemporary cities. The idea is to make a critical counterpoint to classic and modern urban design and thinking, identified by fixed spatial models that deny the dissenting and changing nature of urban social processes (that reinforce sedentary and segregating matrices of city production). Seeking to operate in the opposite direction of the principles of solidity, functionality and beauty advocated by Vitrúvio, we suggest to think about Latin American cities based on the trinomial: destabilizing, deprogramming, deforming.

Keywords:
Urban design; Peripheralization; Time matrix; Transformation; Contemporary Latin American cities