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

How can we approach living experiences focusing on the perception of the inhabitants? What does the integration of quantitative and qualitative perspectives placing the inhabitant at the center of research contribute? These are the questions that the article seeks to answer to investigate the quality of life by relating qualitative and quantitative variables of the experience of living in the densest block and the first one consolidated by the urban renewal process in the city of Santiago de Chile. The study began in the first stage with an (objective) analysis of comfort conditions such as lighting and sunlight, acoustics, quality and equipment of shared spaces, volumetry, and configuration of public spaces, etc. In the second stage, we conducted 500 surveys about inhabitants' quality of life. In the third (subjective) phase, we selected and interviewed ten owners who had been residents for more than five years, exploring the possible contributions of the phenomenological methodology, mainly used in neurosciences, to deepen their perceptions of living and to understand some of the results of the survey. The combination of methods allowed a multiple analysis to approach the experience of living in small apartments in the city's central area. The study's findings, such as the positive evaluation of the neighborhood, acceptable evaluation of housing, high social isolation, and the idealization of the previous housing, also illuminate how the (subjective) notion of well-being is constructed, providing a methodological perspective that favors the approach to the inhabitant’s experience in urban studies.

Bogota's metropolitan context has experienced rapid growth in recent decades regarding population and urban footprint; land occupation has been dispersed with significant territorial imbalance. It has been identified that one of the main barriers to the harmonization of territorial planning processes lies in the difficulty of reaching agreements that are convenient for most of the agents involved in the decisions. Regarding the recently created Metropolitan Region of Bogota Cundinamarca, in this study we analyze the agreements and divergences in the visions of the stakeholder on some strategic alternatives associated with three relevant metropolitan issues: land planning, mobility and the provision of public services. We concluded that although there is agreement on the need to generate institutional arrangements to manage supra-municipal issues, there is still fear of losing municipal autonomy. Land planning decisions could change the balance of local power and hinder the capture of land rents in favor of private agents who benefit from the concentrated, conurbation, and dispersed model in the Sabana de Bogotá area. The analysis provides clues for understanding the divergent visions of actors in the framework of metropolitan governance arrangements.

The urban sprawl on rural lands generates urban-rural interface areas, characterized by the loss of historical agricultural activities and ecosystem services, spatial fragmentation, and social segregation due to how the new neighborhoods materialize. In a dryland ecosystem with limited availability of natural assets, it is essential to plan the growth of the city growth over fertile land. The objective is to investigate the figure of the agrarian park for the protection and enhancement of agricultural territories and its articulation with new residential uses. To do this, primary and secondary sources of information were analyzed along with semi-structured interviews with local actors and direct observation in fieldwork based on a case of study: the department of Guaymallén, in the province of Mendoza (Argentina). The characteristics of the case are analyzed through the analysis of the cultural landscape, and the articulation between natural and cultural factors generates a singular landscape in the urban- rural interface. The agrarian park allows the expression of social, economic, and environmental benefits for protecting and enhancing agricultural landscapes and creating complementary activities for residential uses that are established nearby. The conclusions indicate that the figure of the agrarian park is adequate to rescue the characteristics of the varied agricultural territories, besides ensuring the interaction between different uses and actors to achieve local development.

The option for the quantity and peripheral location of social housing that marked the housing policy in Chile in the decades of the 90s and mid-2000s generated multiple socio-urban problems for the inhabitants. It led to the configuration of segregated peripheries in almost all the country's cities. The direct consequence of these interventions was the complexity of the daily urban life of residents, the sustained deterioration of their living spaces, and their social coexistence. Assuming the concept of “test” —which refers to a complex situation of a historical and structural nature that affects the lives of individuals and forces them to mobilize responses—the urban experience of the beneficiaries of these policies can be considered a priori, a test. Through a qualitative-exploratory study carried out in 2020 in Villa El Nacimiento, a progressive social housing population built in 1992 in the commune of La Pintana, we seek to know what the essential components of the urban test were and the responses that were mobilized to face it for a group of residents. The results confirm the weight of the urban in how the poor are structurally produced by the society of which it is a part, while individual effort and home ownership stand as the main supports.

This research aims to identify the potential implications of the Design Thinking methodology applied to Urban Design processes, as a useful tool to guide situated design processes and innovation facing complexity, learning through the process based on reflective action learning among others. The study analyzes the experience of urban designers and academics on developing urban design projects within the framework of the Master in Integrated Cities Design (MDCI in Spanish) at the Universidad Viña del Mar, Chile (2019-2020), who implemented an Urban Design process under the hypothesis that it serves as an innovative tool in three aspects: empathy, iteration, and scalability. It takes a phenomenological qualitative research methodology and analyzes both the common and distinct experiences of urban designers and academics at the MDCI project laboratory that they recognize as relevant in the process. The experiences were evaluated through group interviews. The data analysis was done through coding methods based on Grounded Theory, identifying those experiences relevant to the Urban Design process that promote the capacity for innovation in the production of urban space. A total of nine innovation dimensions relevant to Urban Design are identified insofar as Design Thinking promotes a focus on the process and not on the final project, encouraging situated knowledge that explores the territory through experimentation based on artifacts and experiences and aims to open ongoing questions. All of this promotes learning through the process of iteration where the Urban Designer takes on the role of facilitator of design processes, promoting forms of local governance for a specific issue and incorporating diverse disciplinary and experiential approaches to address the urban problem.

COVID-19 is especially affecting cities, since many of its problems are related to the urban model, environmental quality or the socioeconomic and health conditions of the population. In this way, cities need to transform their urban planning models and principles to face the pandemic. Broadly speaking, sustainable, healthy and safe city approaches emerge to address post-pandemic urban planning. In this context, this work evaluates a participatory process carried out in Zaragoza (Spain) that aims to design a reference document with measures mostly proposed by citizens to reactivate and adapt the city after COVID-19. To do this, the guidelines that institutions, academia and technicians are recommending to face the COVID-19 crisis are first identified. Next, the alignment of the measures proposed by the citizens of Zaragoza with respect to the previous guidelines as well as the city's strategic urban planning model is evaluated, for which the objectives of these and the approach of the proposals are systematically reviewed. made. The results show a coherence of the proposals made with the revised agendas and guidelines, which is an interesting exercise in convergence between academics, technicians and the needs estimated by society.

Urban building morphology affects energy consumption and is relevant in arid temperate regions with very high solar resources. The cities in dry areas face several risks that threaten their sustainability, affected by the effects of climate change and urbanization, which lead to some consequences over consumption inequality. The objective of the work is to evaluate, in the Metropolitan Area of Mendoza (MMA), the characteristics of building variables, including height, building separation, the relationship of height/building separation, and building density. The basis of this study is the Geographic Information System (GIS) and the statistical analysis of the results, aimed at implementing a future model to determine strategies to maximize the efficiency and energy generation of the urban building area with maximum use of available resources.The blocks analyzed have medium-low values of building separation and low values of building height, height/ building separation ratio, and building density. The 49.10 % of blocks have an average building separation of 16.61 m; the 73.90 % of blocks have an average height of <3.5 m; the 90.52 % of the blocks have mean values <0.30 of the variable height/building separation ratio of urban blocks and 80.85% of blocks have mean values of building density of <2 m2/m3. Based on the results obtained, it is concluded that the MMA has a diffuse city model adapted to the semi-desert climate. It is believed feasible to revalue, preserve and regenerate the current model of "oasis city" in already consolidated areas and propose a new urban model for the future that considers the different cultural contexts, the urban-building and landscape heritage, the other opportunities, and limitations for progress towards energy-environmental sustainability.

The public space is where the diversity of cultural groups converges and interacts with host societies. Migrations give rise to plural, multicultural, and complex social spaces in which immigrants could be subject to exclusion. The article approaches the experience of Central American immigrants in the public space of one of the most multicultural cities in the world: Mexico City. Its main objective is to expose the visibility-invisibility of Central American immigrants in the Historic Center of Mexico City by analyzing their social representations and conceptions of its public space and how they use and appropriate it. The investigation has been approached through a qualitative, empirical, phenomenological, and interdisciplinary methodology in which urbanism and social psychology converge. Among the main results, it was found that the public space in Mexico City is represented as a place of insecurity, deportation, conflict, and begging; it is not considered freely accessible for Central American immigrants. The invisibility of immigrants is signified as something “imposed” due to the non-existence of a public space open to everyone’s alterity, equity, and equality and respectful towards their identities, desires, aspirations, and daily collective lives.