The Latin American city in its terms: a historiographic view at the bibliography between the 1950s and 1970s

Abstract

The Latin-american city, understood as a cultural construction that was established between the 1950s and 1970s, assumed in the specialized literature a series of terms and expressions which started to be taken as explanatory keys to complex processes. "Dependent urbanization", "peripheral growth pattern", "urban spoliation", "marginality", "dual city", among others, are some of the expressions that emerged from the analysis about the accelerated urbanization (not necessarily anchored in industrialization) of some of those cities. Such terms went on to describe or synthesize a multiple and diverse continental reality. And, more important, even today, they continue to be used in the researches and analysis about these cities, oftentimes clouding transformations and crystallizing an image. Thus, it seems important to denaturalize them, recognizing their origins and their senses. This research intends to map these terms' emergence, locating works and authors and seeking to understand correspondences, genealogies, repercussions and counterpoints of expressions and concepts which we still use today. Through a systematic survey of titles published in Latin America in the expanded field of urban studies (Architecture, Urbanism, Geography, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology), between those decades, we seek to recover the formation path of this thought.