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

The objective of this article is to analyze, within the international technical assistance programs, the circulation of the principle of integral planning in Costa Rica between 1949 and 1980. Technical assistance programs will be understood as reflections of the "globalization of solidarity" promoted by the United Nations after 1945 and which made possible, through various modalities such as advisory missions, scholarships, the diffusion of research and the organization of congresses, the cooperation between nations in numerous fields, including urban planning. Through the methodology of social network analysis, it will be determined which international actors and events were fundamental in that process for Costa Rica. Next, it will be determined how the National Institute of Housing and Urbanism (INVU) appropriated the principle and applied it in the projects of the Satellite city of Hatillo and the National Civic Center in San José.

This paper discusses two typological studies, carried out consecutively, on the buildings composing the historic "Ensanche" of Valencia. The interest of both analyses lies on the different approaches that guides each one. The first analysis, carried out on the occasion of drafting the Ensanche Special Protection Plans (PEP), was aimed at determining the capabilities and limits of the different historic buildings, in view to allow a desirable and necessary update of their use value while, at the same time, ensure the preservation of their identity in terms of perceived form. For its part, the second, in-depth analysis focused on the study of the historical evolution ofthe building-types and the modalities of property business and architectural design over more than half a century. Each of the analysis followed its own methodology, as recorded in the text. The presentation of relevant aspects of both studies intends to offer a perspective on the hypothesis of the double character offered by the typological analysis: on one hand, as a proactive, project-oriented tool, aimed at normative action in heritage preservation and use-value updating, controlling transformation through redesign. On the other hand, the analysis as a scientifically based research tool for interpreting the historical evolution of urban fabric. Both have proved complementary, and useful for discussing heritage twofold meaning: formal control and cultural perception.

This paper aims to present a brief reflection on the landscape of the Mediterranean coast, the current image of which is the explicit result of the paradigm changes that took place throughout the 20th century with the arrival of mass tourism. Often, the study of residential development on the Mediterranean coast is based on the analysis of the first models of implementation of the Spa Garden City, whose guidelines –imported– were clear and, to a certain extent, accurate. Walking through the labyrinth of the city, now invertebrate, we collect spaces, objects and experiences through photographs, drawings, cartographies and stories. In contrast with archival materials, we present in-depth documents in order to understand a landscape drawn by both functional planning and personal kitsch. We continue with the research we began in Recomposing fragments. Nowadays, the intuition that keeping one eye attentive to the detail of the domestic while the other one looks from afar at the phenomenon that embraces it –a look at two scales– can reveal some essential keys to understanding our surrounding landscape and interacting with it. Such an apparently irrational landscape –viewed at a distance– could perhaps – looked at closely– be understood as something logical and natural, for it is no more than the landscape of our dreams, materialized, turned into reality.

The way cities have grown in recent decades has resulted in a profound transformation of their urban structure. In Latin America, this process has been marked by the predominance of self-construction and informal developments under different models, including the Social Production of the Habitat. In Spain, this growth has manifested itself through processes of urban dispersion with the particularity of having welcomed, together with planned developments, others carried out outside the planning. Associated with these, the illegal urbanizations had a special incidence in the seventies and eighties of the last century. In this context, the objective of the article is to establish an analysis two forms of cityproduction that, although manifested in different spatial and socioeconomic contexts, present certain common elements. Methodologically, the research is presented from a double perspective; of a theoretical nature, from the analysis of secondary sources putting in dialogue two conceptual traditions of similar processes in different regions. And the second of an empirical type, focused on the study of the spatial scope of illegal developments in Spain. The results suggest that they maintain a significant presence in the peripheries of the country’s main cities. And, secondly, that the changes of model have turned it into a mode of production of space outside the official channels and, in a sense, not alienated by the State, traits that bring it closer to the Social Production of the Habitat.

This research work is a prospective exercise that identifies the location logics of urban facilities within the Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México (ZMVM) as a replicable methodology for Mexican cities. To this end, it is based on prospective scenarios, according to the Estructura del Sistema Normativo de Equipamiento Urbano (ESNEU) of the Secretaria de Desarrollo Social (SEDESOL, 1999) and on destinations of commercial, housing, industrial and agricultural land uses, which are integrated according to variables of social and economic capital, public or private property and population density, reflecting areas of population benefited and served to determine a logic of metropolitan location. By doing so, it analyzes the possible scope of territorial reconversion as an instrument of mitigation of certain socio-territorial factors, which condition urban poverty. At the same time, it recognizes a deficiency in access to education and health services in the urban peripheries, originated in market control and land ownership, real estate speculation and a logic in favor of private capital over the social welfare of lower income groups. It is in this sense that this study presents a model of the location logics of urban facilities inviting to review the current urban planning criteria, which operates on the territorial phenomena of the expansion of Mexican cities, in order to solve these particular problems of social backwardness, which affect the conditions of urban poverty.

The article addresses the issue of dissident art in public spaces, which denounces the hegemonic ideology and is countercultural. Understanding by ideology, the forms that sustain the production system, and that, at present, is the capitalist system. We also understand by “dissident” the forms of thought and participation, in this case artistic plastic or visual arts interventions, which, being countercultural, are left without space through the legitimized mechanisms of exhibition in the city, but which, nevertheless, as a resistance strategy, they find their place in the city within the framework of illegality. A semiotic analysis of the urban artwork of the British artist Banksy is made, trying to read in some of his works, his dissident proposal, as well as the background of the forms of intervention of public and private space, which occur without agreement or consent informed between the artist of the works (an anonymous individual, who uses a pseudonym, with which he signs the work) and the owners or managers of the buildings; and how this intervention strategy is part of that dissident resistance proposal. This analysis allows us to understand how public space becomes the support for the work of some individual artists, who find immense potential in the use of the city to communicate their politically countercultural ideas or ideological positions. Thus, the phenomenon of "artistic vandalization" of public space is analyzed as a "positioning" to shape an art of social denunciation.

Social disinterest and lack of citizen empowerment affect the urban landscape, coupled with poor control of the application of regulations and the management of fragmented territorial information, of which the city of Portoviejo (Manabí, Ecuador) is not exempt, since there are settlements that occupy risk and protection zones, causing pollution, degradation and social disconnection with the river landscape. The present study seeks to determine the incidence of land use change in the fluvial urban landscape of Portoviejo, through Geographic Information tools, in order to generate inputs for planning and decision making. The spatial-temporal analysis in the years 1985, 2001 and 2020 carried out by means of the supervised classification through categories with the adapted CORINE Land Cover method evidences the exponential change of decrease of natural features and increase of anthropic features by 14% until the year 2020. In addition, it was identified that the areas with the highest concentration of constructions are located in the northern and central sectors of the city, where coincidentally there is a decrease in the natural context with the passage of time.

Salvador de Bahia is the fourth largest and the most violent among Brazilian capital cities in rate of homicide (2021). However, the highest rates fall on the young and black man, residents in popular neighborhoods. The study's locus was the Atlantic Coast which, although it’s not the region of the city with the highest homicide rates, it’s dynamic in real estate market and contiguity between popular and high-income neighborhoods, showing the process of urban segregation and differences in public safety. In this way, the statistics of lethal violence (homicides and police actions) were analyzed in 2018-2020, to find relations with the socio-spatial and racial inequalities. For this, it was necessary to study socioeconomic indicators, as well as to map and to tabulate the deaths. The hot points and empty areas, in approximation, suggested to investigate micro-relationships and, with this, to problematize the nexus between violence and “poverty” as never absolute.

Most cities evolves and expand urban and demographically over time, which leads to think of new dynamics of urban growth from what is known, without forgetting the importance of public space in the image and development of a city. The objective of this research is to contrast the urban growth of the city of Manizales, Colombia by periods from its foundation to the present, based on the relationship between public space area, number of inhabitants and urbanized area. Using a geographic information system (GIS) with the free software QGIS, cartography was compiled and processed together with photographs and data layers for each period, to analyze the urban form, public space, urban density and population increase. Nine time periods were identified, from 1848 to 2021, in which a constant effective growth of urban form and public space was evidenced until the period 1993-2008, along with a gradual decrease in population density recorded since the founding of the city. So far, no urban studies have been found that contrast population growth and its relationship with the public space of the city of Manizales, preventing new visions of the historical evolution from its founding date to the present.

The different elite groups of the country have used the historic center of Managua as a territory to print and superimpose their narratives, at the same time it has served as a scene of conflict between the dominant memories. The present work takes as a starting point the reading of this urban center as a document of memories. It stops at the analysis of some spaces that make up said center and places them in three temporalities: the Sandinista Popular Revolution and the rupture of the Somocista temporality, 1979 onwards; the end of the revolutionary period and the entrance to neoliberalism, 1990 onwards; the return of the Sandinista government as of 2007. You wonder what narratives the government elites projected on the historic center of the city of Managua? Who were and are its actors? What actions did they launch and how are such actions inscribed in the place, materializing and legitimizing their narratives about said space? Through what sociopolitical processes did other actors break with this narrative?