Latin America at the Crossroads

This issue of AD, Latin America at the Crossroads, exposes how the challenge of the informal city in Latin America has led to new strategies and the creation of a new, more social role for architects and city designers. New urban strategies have been fostered by the progressive policies of city mayors, and are focused on stitching together polarised areas of cities. They are important as they are creating a new architectural discourse, and represent the vanguard in mitigating social segregation and spatial injustice in cities across the globe.

These new methodologies are home grown, site specific solutions to local problems. For this reason, they differ enormously from the modernist methodologies developed in Latin America´s cities in the 1940s through 70s which were out of scale with their context, and responded to a vastly different scale of economy.

Looking Beyond Informality takes a closer look at the new optimism surrounding Latin America, which is reminiscent of a similar optimism experienced in the 1960s. This is viewed in the context of larger economic and political issues that reveal the fine line between optimism and opportunism. One example discussed is the interventions in informal areas like favelas and barrios undertaken by architects in recent years. The problem lies not in the interventions themselves, but in a paradigm in which informality has become the consensus. Have we perhaps put too much faith in informality?

Other issues discussed include the Rio Olympics, urban “acupuncture,” macro vs micro scale interventions, and the question of the possibilities that may have been left behind in too quickly embracing a “post-utopian” world.