Facing Coloniality of Urbanization: Latin American and Amereida's Geo-poetic of Design
Título | Facing Coloniality of Urbanization: Latin American and Amereida's Geo-poetic of Design |
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Año | 2021 |
Autor | Álvaro Mercado |
Tipo de Publicación | Ponencia |
Revista | Memory Full? Reimagining the Relations Between Design and History |
Editorial | Design History Society |
Edición | 2021 |
URL | https://www.memoryfull2021.org/programme/#programme-thursday |
Carreras Relacionadas | Arquitectura, Diseño |
Today, the ‘Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America’ (IRSAA), a groundbreaking transnational urbanization project for the development and integration of the South American hinterland, is taking place. However, its implementation generates strong opposition due to its hidden potential for territorial overexploitation and borderline nature and culture deterioration. Moreover, according to critical Latin-American intellectuals, this project echoes and perpetuates the logic of ‘coloniality’ embedded in the urbanization of the South. Facing this critical scenario that calls for new epistemological and ontological bases to understand, imagine and design territories beyond hegemonic and technocratic approaches, this paper presents the geo-poetic Latin-American vision created in the 1960s’ by the School of Architecture and Design of the PUCValparaíso as a groundwork for cross-disciplinary approaches in design studies and practices. Through the intersections between performative poetry, design, historiography and ontological questions towards Latin-American territories, the School opened a way to critically inquire into the colonial and postcolonial urbanization, and the peripheral/dependent situation of the region in planetary scale. By analysing the links between the Amereida’s trip (1965), the poem (1967), and the Thesis of the Interior Sea and Own North (1970),this contribution unfolds how poetics and critical politicalinsights concerning dependency, coloniality, and development in Latin-America were interwoven in these works’ narratives,representations and actions, generating their original geopoetic of design. Lastly, this contribution presents the ongoing embodiment of ontological questions about the Latin-American being and the being of Latin-America as the fundamental to explore and to think the occupation of the South-American hinterland through situated design experiences, producing decolonial and pluriversal insights for design, architecture and urbanism.