Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Los conjuntos históricos constituyen enclaves urbanos de alto interés patrimonial. Son espacios fundacionales de la ciudad destinados originalmente al hábitat. Han representado un paradigma de la noción de barrio y un referente de modelo sostenible urbano, social y económico en la cultura mediterránea europea. El fenómeno turístico puede ser una valiosa herramienta de impulso económico en esos ámbitos, pero existe el riesgo de que la sostenibilidad urbana acabe derivando en una mera explotación económica. Esta investigación realiza un estudio de caso sobre dos conjuntos históricos del levante español, representativos de la cultura urbana mediterránea, que están experimentado estos procesos, Altea y La Vila Joiosa. Se ha empleado una metodología analítica basada en indicadores multidimensionales de sostenibilidad urbana más orientados hacia lo funcional y social que a lo material. Los resultados presentan convergencias con los principales estudios del marco teórico, pero también algunos matices derivados de particularidades económicas, sociales y culturales de los conjuntos analizados en cuanto a población, vivienda y usos. Las conclusiones recalcan la importancia de asentar la imagen urbana, apoyarse en el arraigo ciudadano, evitar la privatización del espacio público y apostar por un turismo sostenible.

Urban wetlands in Chilean cities are one of the urban ecosystems most affected by real estate developments. Despite their importance for recreation and biodiversity, they are constantly shrinking due to deficient urban planning processes. However, with the recent boom of green and sustainable cities, wetlands are being revalued through restoration projects and open urban parks, with natural value for the well-being of habitats and the urban population. In this sense, promoting accessibility through suitable infrastructure will contribute to improving the quality of life of inhabitants and the urban environment, specifically through the integration of blue-green infrastructure. Walkable access to a network of wetlands called "La Ruta del Agua" (“the water trail”) has been analyzed here, through a perception-based survey, looking to improve access to nature in cities. The urban wetlands assessed comprise five ecosystems located in different types of neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Concepción, Chile. Although this is a local case study, it is relevant from a methodological perspective, given the existence of a large number of degraded urban wetlands in Latin America that are in danger of disappearing. The results show that wetlands are accessible by walking, but the fact that they are rarely visited, despite being close to residential areas, reveals a lack of integration as open green spaces, rich in biodiversity, and as places of recreation in the city of Concepción. The results of this study are valuable for the design of future “wetland parks”, one which must consider the ecosystem values, biodiversity, and recreation for people’s well-being.

Public policies such as urban redensification, rather than mere technical interventions addressing concrete problems, work as a power mechanism. Analyzing the visibility of the politics of life - biopolitics - and of death - necropolitics - in Mexico City derived from the COVID-19 pandemic will allow an understanding of this. In addition, it will allow revealing the paradox that the same policy, redensification, is a failure as a public policy and, simultaneously, a success as a policy of life and death. Starting from sociology and based on a genealogical methodology, data on the effects of urban redensification and the pandemic in Mexico City were analyzed, to subsequently intertwine them and recognize a relationship between them. Special attention was paid to the period of non-compulsory confinement and two neighboring districts of Mexico City: Iztapalapa and Benito Juárez. Thus recognizing a class configuration of space linked to urban design that influenced the localized consequences of the pandemic.

Este 2022 cumple 50 años el informe Meadows que ya en 1972 ponía la alerta sobre el límite del crecimiento y sobre el carácter finito de los recursos naturales que se encuentran al servicio del sistema de desarrollo. Se tuvo que esperar hasta el año 1987 para que la ONU publicara el Informe Brundtland, inicialmente conocido como Our Common Future, y definiera el concepto de desarrollo sostenible resaltando la necesidad moral de realizar un uso responsable de los recursos para la conservación del planeta. Sin embargo, este concepto, muy desgastado y desvirtuado en la actualidad, no implicaba explícitamente una mirada crítica al modelo lineal imperante basado en la extracción, producción, consumo y el desecho. En ese sentido, el concepto de “circularidad” amplía al de desarrollo sostenible ya que avanza en reorientar el actual modelo de producción hacia el cierre de sus ciclos, asimilándolos así a los ecosistemas naturales. La circularidad apuesta por la construcción de un círculo virtuoso que reduzca al máximo los recursos empleados en el origen del sistema, así como los residuos de salida, mediante la reparación, la reutilización o el reciclaje.

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The eviction of migrants from Plaza Brasil, in the city of Iquique, an act that was questioned due to the violence used by public forces, revealed not just the humanitarian problem involved, but also a turning point in attempts to normalize a process where cities have been altered by the exodus of migrants. This study looks into the impacts generated by the successive stages of migration within the Venezuelan migratory flow, one characterized by the great vulnerability of these migrants. Since the start of 2020, amid a health crisis and border closures, they have entered Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile by land using unauthorized crossings, to find better living conditions in these destinations. Here, the approaches which connect flows and transformations as responses to reproduction factors of global society, with those that conceive mobility as a “creative force” that interacts autonomously with these structures, are discussed. To this end, mobility in the historical centers of three cities located in border transit and entry zones to each country, where the interrelation in public space has been transformed and stressed, is explored, namely Piura, in Peru, and Iquique and Antofagasta in Chile. The results show similarities in the dynamics and transformations generated. Given the vulnerable condition of migrants, there is an increase in the occupation of public space, through autonomous actions of self-management and organization, as well as local resistance, demonstrating the relevance of mobility in modern society. All-in-all, it is recommended to adopt a differentiated agenda to understand the connection between migrants and places during the mobility experience.

Cities located in arid areas are facing several risks that threaten their sustainability due to the effects of climate change and urbanization, and the resulting consumption inequality and depletion of natural resources. There are many variables that determine the urban-building form, which, in turn, affects energy consumption in cities. Therefore, the goal of this work is to condense the information provided by the urban-building morphological variables into just a few variables or combinations for the urban blocks located in the six departments of Mendoza’s Metropolitan Area (MMA). Methodologically, quantitative data of the spatial distribution of urban-building variables were considered, their correlations were calculated, and a Principal Component Analysis was applied to synthesize the number of variables. The results identify the Building Density, Building Separation, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as the main variables of the first principal component, in five of the six departments of the MMA. The first two are related to the built environment, and the third is to vegetation. By including data on urban tree cover, available only for the Capital department, the results include the tree-cover magnitude, completeness, and transmissivity variables, together with those already identified in the first three components. The findings of the work provide information on the representative urban-building variables of the oasis city that will allow, in the future, establishing intervention priorities considering a reduced number of synthetic variables, to propose efficiency and energy generation strategies.

Traditional markets in Latin American metropolises may mitigate the risks of urbanization-commercialization in historical sites and mediate rural-city and ancestral-contemporary interactions. Considering that the Xochimilco Market (Mexico City) generates centripetal-centrifugal forces which activate the local economy (formal and informal), the goal of the article is to analyze the indissolubility of its neighboring internal and external trade spaces (producer zones, informal trade, chinampas), creating a territory of supply, labor, and subsistence of the impoverished population. A mixed methodological design is adopted, with participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and qualitative spatial analysis. The decolonial concept of " territorial heritage" and the theory of "circuits of urban economy" applied to the Global South helps verify the socio-spatial experiences and permanence that, from the market, subjects and families have maintained, in a scenario of selective modernization of metropolitan territories and growth of informality onto the continent.

Urban heritage is a category of cultural heritage. Historic centers are protected by a legal framework that safeguards the values that are the object of the declaration. The study of urban heritage protection policy in Colombia has been limited by the classical perspective. In contrast, this research performs a case study on conservation legislation and the historical centers declared in Colombia as Assets of Cultural Interest (BIC, in Spanish) between 1954 and 2019 from historical institutionalism. The methodology used is the Path Dependence Application Scheme (EAPD, in Spanish), which seeks to recognize the relationships between the variables, periods, and trajectory of the object of study; to demonstrate the hypothesis of this work, namely the emergence of urban heritage and protection mechanisms is due to the debilitation of the law and ideas of historical heritage. The preliminary conclusions outline five periods and emphasize the mutual dependence of urban heritage and protection policies, as well as the recent emergence of citizen participation, and the loss of flexibility and versatility of the legal framework with manifestations of irreversibility in the conservation of urban heritage.

What role should Chilean State Universities play in their territories? The social uprising, Covid-19, along with natural disasters like the 2010 earthquake, remind us that global phenomena have serious repercussions on the local sphere and that it is on this scale where security and resilience to change need to be generated to overcome major catastrophes, to face the challenges of our cities, and to provide local endogenous development and quality of life for those living there. Specifically, the Law on State Universities, 21.094 of 2018, reminds us that these institutions must contribute to the sustainable development of the country and the progress of society in the diverse areas of knowledge and culture. This law put on the table several challenges for the comprehensive transformation of Chilean universities. Among them, is that of strengthening their role as generators of knowledge and human capital, to contribute to the local development of their territories from the perspective of sustainability. This challenge implies rethinking, first, what the current society, with whom we have to jointly generate the transformations, is like, and second, what the local and nationwide challenges to target are, always from a sustainability approach.