"Documenta11_Urban Imaginaries from Latin America", Armando Silva, Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 2003

What constitutes an urban imaginary? According to the thesis of this project, drawn from the working papers, statistical analysis, and research of a team of urbanists, social historians, and anthropologists led by Armando Silva in Bogotá, Colombia, an urban imaginary is born precisely at the point where living in the city no longer denotes the condition of being urban. The urban in the context of this book explodes from the instrumentalization of categories of relationships whereby the urban in question is not only the collectivization of lived and imagined possibilities in a complex network of space and time, it also draws out a new dimension of possible civic reterritorializations worked out of a temporal flux. According to the logic which Silva and his collaborators impute to this reterritorialized phenomenon of urbanity in Latin American cities, the imagined city is most vivid to those who encounter it in the zone where a new urban paradigm writes over the old physical stain of the planned city. Thus the use of imaginaries presupposes not only the plurality of effects and patterns of urbanity, but also a group of dissimilar experiences that point towards common effects. Working from this logic, the urban imaginaries of this book stem from the specificity of 13 Latin American cities but are not necessarily circumscribed or determined by their physical geography. Urban Imaginaries from Latin America does not evoke a singular, totalized idea of urban culture from the South American continent, but rather sets the variety of cultures in dynamic relationship to each other through texts, statistics, postcards, television, and other popular media, portraits, and urban maps.
Edited by Armando Silva.
Essays by Carolina Aguirre, Miguel Ángel Aguilar, Fernando Carrión, Natalia Fernández, Tulio Hernández, Mónica Lacarrieu, Nelson Martínez, Verónica Pallini, Valeria Silvina Pita, Lisbeth Rebollo, Nelly Richard, Amparo Sevilla, Alejandra Vassallo and Teresa Velázquez.
Paperback 6.25 x 9 in., 336 pages, 184 color &, 75 b/w illustrations

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