The globalization of risks and social and environmental disasters: challenges and perspectives for rethinking the urban in Latin America

Abstract

The intensification and globalization of social and environmental risks and disasters pose unprecedented challenges to social, political and legal structures, especially in Latin America, a region historically marked by coloniality of power and dependent urbanization. The research problem that guides this study asks the following question: how does the globalization of social and environmental risks and disasters challenge Latin American urban and regional thinking and which paths can be built for refounding it based on critical and pluriversal epistemology? The hypothesis is that traditional categories, shaped by Eurocentrism and functionalism, are insufficient to understand and address the civilizational crisis expressed in the unequal production of territories. The general objective is to understand how the global expansion of risks requires reconsidering urban and regional thinking based on plural epistemology. Specifically, the article aims to analyze: a) the globalization of risks and the social and environmental crisis in the Global South; b) the limits of the modern urban and regional paradigm; and c) the urban in Latin America, rethinking it from the perspective of the logic of risks. To this end, it employs the hypothetico-deductive scientific method, a qualitative approach and the bibliographic research technique, based on critical theoretical contributions. Is thus conclude that addressing the globalization of risks and rethinking the urban and the regional in Latin America is an essential theoretical, ethical and political task for establishing fairer, more resilient and more plural alternatives in the face of the climate emergency and the profound territorial inequalities in the Global South.