Call for papers for Special Issue: Navigating variegation, negation and constitution. New foundational pillars for urban-regional Latin-American thinking

Call for papers for Special Issue: Navigating variegation, negation and constitution. New foundational pillars for urban-regional Latin-American thinking

Coordination: Jeroen Johannes Klink (UFABC), Victor Ramiro Fernández (CONICET / Universidad Nacional del Litoral) e Guillermo Jajamovich (CONICET / Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Deadline for submission: April 30, 2025

Publication: v.28, 2026

-

Navigating variegation, negation and constitution. New foundational pillars for urban-regional Latin-American thinking

Latin American thinking experienced a golden period from the 1950s to the 1970s/1980s. It generated innovative reflections on the entanglements between the contradictory spatialities of the subcontinent and the dynamics of the capitalist system on a global scale. The theoretical effervescence of this period contributed to build an understanding, which was grounded in the analytical lenses of Latin American structuralism, ECLAC thinking (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) and dependency perspectives, on phenomena such as the growing macro-regional disparities, economic growth without development, but triggering socio-environmental degradation, as well as the links between urbanization and industrialization accompanied by low wages and the proliferation of favelas in cities, among other examples. The Latin American intellectual project not only presented a powerful critique of the prevailing economic and political structures in the world system but also envisaged alternative development strategies for the region.

This project has lost momentum. At the same time, the multifaceted transformations that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century triggered academic debates around analytical lenses with totalizing tendencies – for example, neoliberalization; financialization; the emergence of new communication and information technologies; the platformization of urban and regional economies; and the spread of socio-environmental risks on a planetary scale – which did not always take into account the geographic and historical specificities of Latin America. To aggravate this scenario, the growing hierarchization of the international division of intellectual labor consolidated a geoeconomic and political infrastructure for the production, circulation, and appropriation of knowledge that favored academic centers in the center – mainly those located in the English-speaking world –, with fewer spaces for articulation for reflection from Latin America.

Within this setting we have witnessed the emergence of a research agenda with bipolar features. One strand of literature has adopted a perspective of variegations to macrostructural trends to understand the geographic and historical specificities of the ongoing transformations in urban and regional spaces in the Global South. There are variations around this theme – for example, subordinated financialization; the variegated transformation of spatial and scalar dynamics of Latin American national developmentalism considering the ongoing neoliberalization of spaces on a planetary scale, etc. – but the common denominator of this research program is the possibility of establishing conversations between the Global North and South based on these differentiated spatial trajectories. Another perspective is built around the negation of totalizing theorizations and narratives that frame the particularities and nuances of territories in the Global South. According to this perception, the risk of macrostructural analytical keys is to consolidate “misplaced ideas” (Schwartz, 2014). An emblematic example is the concept of neoliberalization, associated with the idea of ​​dismantling the Welfare State, considering that, unlike the spatial Keynesianism that prevailed in the center of the world system, under Latin American national developmentalism the State never assumed the social risk and constituted a public fund, as an indirect salary, to guarantee socio-spatial cohesion. The negational perspective, anchored in post-structuralism, problematizes comparative conversations on a global scale and postulates the need to expand the geographies of theory (Robinson, 2002; Roy, 2002).

These entrenched epistemic positions have hindered the research agenda. However, the premise of this special issue is that the impasse can be productive, that is, represent the seed for the constitution of theoretical lenses aimed at building new foundations for Latin American thought in the face of multiple challenges of the 21st century (Brandão; Fernández; Ribeiro, 2018). A political-intellectual project of this nature from the Global South and Latin America relies on cosmopolitanism and conversations with allied authors from the North. To this end, two foundational pillars should be mentioned.

First, the exploration of epistemologies of difference that possibly go beyond variegation or negation to the constitution of new analytical lenses that advance the field of urban and regional studies from Latin America and make it truly more global and plural. From this perspective, the recognition of the specificities of places does not deny broader transformations, but does not represent them, a priori, as variations from spatialities associated with broader capitalism. At the same time, the reading of specific places contributes to the building of mid-level, revisable theories – always in a partial, preliminary way in light of more detailed empirical research (Brandão et. al., 2024) – that try to make sense of broader urban and regional dynamics. A paradigmatic example of such an epistemic exercise, in other times, was the constitution of Francisco de Oliveira's platypus emerging from the entanglements between the modern and the backward.

Another pillar is the articulation between original critical reflection and transformative praxis. More specifically, the phenomenology of specific places hypothetically not only constitutes the seed of alternative understandings (simultaneously grounded inside and outside systemic dynamics) but also contributes to the design of “insurgent” spatial strategies, to use contemporary vocabulary, that are, counter-hegemonic, transgressive and imaginative in relation to the global spatial order (Miraftab, 2009). Even though the “really existing” territorial organization and intervention of the developmentalist State during the 20th century was, in most cases, quite contradictory, Latin American spatial thinking did embody such insurgency. It pointed out alternative development strategies – industrialization; import substitution; regional policies aimed at building complementarities and territorial solidarity, etc. – as well as new spatial practices that recognized the right to the city – for example, through favela upgrading schemes.

Considering this challenge of constituting new foundational pillars for the Latin American political-intellectual project in face of the challenges in the field of urban studies and urban and regional planning in the 21st century, we invite strictly theoretical and/or theoretical-empirical articles that:

 

 

 

 

- Establish a constituent epistemic conversation with the “macrostructural” theoretical lenses adopted to explain the spatialities and statehoods of contemporary capitalism, in general, and of Latin America, in particular (for example, financialization; neoliberalization; digitalization and platformization of urban, regional and national economies; globalization of socio-environmental risks and disasters, etc.);

-  Seek, on the basis of an investigation of certain singularities in the production and appropriation of urban and regional spaces in Latin America (for example, illegality, informality, irregularity, and the entanglements with “legal”, “formal” and “regular” spaces; rentier accumulation patterns and patrimonialism; colonization of spatial thought and practices; racism and environmental injustice, etc.), to advance in the generation of new knowledge in the field of urban and regional studies from Latin America;

- Advance towards understanding the constitution, circulation and appropriation of theories, policies, urban models (for example, de Soto's (2000) dead capital thesis) and spatial practices (forms of land regularization) in the international scenario and their entanglements with the multi-scalar and relational production of urban and regional space in Latin America;

- Try to analyze, from a historical perspective, moments and episodes in the elaboration of urban and regional theories that address their situated character, their Latin American nature and the way in which they sought to intervene in the context in which they emerged.

References:

BRANDÃO, C.A.; SANFELICI, D.; MAGALHÃES, F.N.C.; PERNASETTI, F.; SIQUEIRA, H.; KLINK, J.; TONUCCI, J.; SOUZA, M.B. de. Geografias econômicas variegadas do neoliberalismo e do desenvolvimento desigual. Uma introdução às contribuições de Jamie Peck. Revista Geografias, v. 20, n.1, 2024. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/geografias/article/view/56046. Acessado: 8 dezembro 2024.

BRANDÃO, C.A; FERNÁNDEZ, V.R.; RIBEIRO, L.C.Q. (Orgs). Escalas espaciais, reescalonamentos e estatalidades: lições e desafios para América Latina. Rio de Janeiro: Observatório das Metrópoles/Letra Capital, 2018.  

DE SOTO, H.  The mystery of capital. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

GORELIK, A. Gorelik, A. La ciudad latinoamericana, una figura de la imaginación social del siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2022.

MIRAFTAB, F. Insurgent Planning. Situating Radical Planning in the Global South. Planning Theory, v. 8, n.1, p. 32-50.

ROBINSON, J. Global and world cities: a view from off the map. International journal of urban and regional research, 26(3), 531-554, 2002.

ROY, A. Roy, A. The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory'. Regional Studies, 43(6), 819-830, 2002.

SCHWARTZ, R. As ideias fora do lugar. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro: Penguin/Companhia das Letras, 2014.