Creative spaces : urban culture and marginality in Latin America

CreativeSpaces: Urban Culture and Marginality is aninterdisciplinary exploration of the different ways in which marginal urbanspaces have become privileged locations for creativity in Latin America.

Theessays within the collection reassess dominant theoretical notions of'marginality' in the region and argue that, in contemporary society, itinvariably allows for (if not leads to) the production of the new. While LatinAmerican cities have, since their foundation, always included marginal spaces(due, for example, to the segregation of indigenous groups), the massiveexpansion of informal housing constructed on occupied land in the second halfof the twentieth century have brought them into the collective imaginary likenever before. Originally viewed as spaces of deprivation, violence, anddangerous alterity, the urban margins were later romanticized as spaces ofopportunity and popular empowerment.

Instead, this volume analyses theproduction of new art forms, political organizations and subjectivities emergingfrom the urban margins in Latin America, neither condemning nor idealizing theeffects they produce. To account for thecomplex nature of contemporary urban marginality, the volume draws on research froma wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from cultural and urban studies toarchitecture and sociology.

Thus the collection analyzes how these differentconceptions of marginal spaces work together and contribute to the imagined andmaterial reality of the wider city.