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August

The Feminine City

Cities, often feminized in name and narrative, embody not just physical structures but symbolic spaces of care, memory, and identity. Drawing from Barcelona amb nom de dona, Vivas i Elias (2021) contemplates how urban policies can emulate the nurturing role of mothers, arguing that urban environments should protect, educate, and support their inhabitants with the same inclusive and empathetic logic. The marginalization of women in urban memory—evident in place names and spatial representations—is interpreted as a form of structural violence that must be actively redressed through toponymic justice and gender-conscious planning. The essay positions the city as a potential maternal space, one capable of embracing its citizens through socially responsive infrastructures and symbolic recognition of historically silenced voices. By framing urban planning through maternal ethics, the text promotes a reimagination of urban governance rooted in values of equity and affection rather than control and exclusion. This vision demands cities that are not only smart or sustainable but also caring and inclusive, where diversity is not tolerated but celebrated, and where public spaces are reshaped to reflect the multiplicity of those who inhabit them. The city, thus, becomes a living archive of collective care and recognition, reflecting the interplay between gender, space, and social justice).

Vivas i Elias, P. (2021). La ciutat: mare nostra. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(1).

Distances That We Are

Urban distance is more than a question of metres—it is perceived, lived, and embodied, often shaped by gender, class, race, and emotional geography. In this study, spatial relationships in the city are interrogated not through Cartesian logic but through affective cartographies, where walking a block may carry radically different meanings depending on who is walking and under what conditions. The authors propose that urban proximity does not guarantee connection, and that cities are composed of invisible thresholds marked by fear, trust, desire, and vulnerability. Using ethnographic fragments, sensory narratives, and feminist urban theory, the article shows how distance is generated not by space alone but by layers of emotional dissonance, systemic exclusion, and symbolic violence. Children are kept indoors due to insecurity, neighbours remain strangers despite physical closeness, and daily routines are choreographed around avoidance. These dynamics reflect deeper structures of segregation, both social and affective. Rather than seeking objective metrics, the authors advocate for an urban epistemology attentive to bodily geographies, where what is near might be emotionally unreachable, and what is far can be longed for or feared. This approach reframes the concept of urban planning, shifting from infrastructural optimisation to a politics of recognition and care, where cities must be read not only by their built form but by the emotional landscapes they generate and conceal.

Cociña, C. and Gaitán Almeida, P. (2019). Las distancias que son en la ciudad: percepciones, espacios afectivos y cuerpos urbanos. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(1), 117–128.¡

Urban Palimpsests and the Symbolic Afterlife

The urban landscape of Madrid bears the silent traces of a bygone era of analog advertising, encapsulated in layers of adhesive stickers once used to promote locksmith services and other trades. These remnants, now obsolete in function due to the rise of digital search culture, remain as palimpsests—visual testimonies of temporal strata within the city. Avendaño (2021) interprets these sticker clusters on traffic lights, mailboxes, and metal surfaces as urban archaeology, where the deterioration and overlapping of stickers mirror the chaotic yet structured logic of street-level competition and the evolution of public communication. Although no longer consulted in emergencies, these neglected pieces of paper still participate in the visual culture of the city, marking the transition from physical to digital modes of engagement. Their persistent presence highlights the contrast between the ephemeral nature of street advertising and its unintentional permanence, suggesting that cities, through such overlooked details, store collective memory in everyday materials. This transformation—from utility to artifact—positions the sticker not just as residue, but as a symbolic index of shifting urban semiotics, where analog remnants become part of a visual dialogue with the present. The analysis extends to how these obsolete markers anticipate the visual saturation of digital screens, offering a tangible precursor to the continuous visual occupation of urban space (Avendaño, 2021).

Avendaño, G.E. (2021). Pegatinas, palimpsesto y publicidad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(2). 

Craftsmanship and Urban Identity

 

The transformation of manual labor into symbolic capital is a defining trait of the postindustrial urban economy, where formerly low-status occupations are repackaged as prestigious vocations through processes of aestheticization and class repositioning. Richard E. Ocejo’s ethnographic study Masters of Craft dissects this shift by examining how professions like butchery, bartending, and barbering are elevated in contemporary cities. These crafts, traditionally linked to working-class identity, are now practiced by educated, often white, middle-class individuals who embrace them not only as employment but as lifestyle and self-expression. The book argues that these revalorized jobs are performative, publicly staged, and deeply entwined with urban gentrification and the creation of "authentic" consumer experiences. These new artisans not only perform technical labor but also curate taste, educating clientele and shaping cultural hierarchies through interaction and presentation. This exclusive repositioning of craft reflects broader urban dynamics, where certain neighborhoods and commercial zones become cultural hubs for elite consumption, while the traditional functions of these trades are subtly displaced. Ocejo reveals that identity, labor, and value are no longer fixed to economic necessity but instead orbit the realm of symbolic performance, where work becomes a stage for enacting social distinction. The study underscores how urban redevelopment is as much about semiotic innovation as spatial transformation, positioning craftsmanship as both an economic strategy and a cultural discourse (Espinoza, 2020).

Espinoza, G.E. (2020). Reseña de Richard E. Ocejo (2017) Masters of craft: Old jobs in the new urban economy. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(1), pp.119–122

Memory in Havana’s Chinatown

The application of visual anthropology in photojournalistic practices allows for an innovative exploration of identity and cultural expressions within Havana’s Chinatown, a historically rich and interculturally dynamic space. Through methods such as participant observation and ethnographic photography, researchers from the University of Havana have illuminated how cultural practices in this neighborhood reflect both continuity and transformation across time. The study identifies five symbolic practices—religious rituals, interpersonal relations, spatial interactions, cultural memory, and consumption habits—as key expressions of identity formation. Notably, the memory of Chinese migration and its integration into the Cuban sociocultural matrix is evidenced in the hybrid practices that persist despite the demographic decline of the Chinese population. The tension between ethnic heritage and broader national identity surfaces in the photojournalistic narrative that seeks not only to document but to interpret and engage with the lived reality of the community. A significant case is the Group Promotor del Barrio Chino, which, during the 1990s, aimed to recover endangered traditions like the Lion and Dragon dances. Though this initiative eventually faded, it marked a pivotal effort in heritage preservation. Ultimately, the camera becomes a tool of both cultural insight and advocacy, emphasizing that urban identity is not static but constructed through practices, memories, and symbolic negotiations, especially in areas where ethnicity, commerce, and memory converge in complex urban layers (Carvajal Suárez et al., 2021).

Carvajal Suárez, E., Ferrán Fernández, Y., Hernández García, L. and Martín Pastrana, A. (2021). Acercamiento a las prácticas culturales del Barrio Chino habanero desde la antropología visual en la producción fotoperiodística. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(2), pp.115–126. 

The Banished Latin City

 

The spatial exclusion and symbolic resistance of Latinx communities in U.S. cities is vividly illustrated by Magnolia Park in Houston, Texas, where ethnic enclaves evolve into sites of both marginalisation and cultural assertion. This barrio, interpreted through a critical ethnographic lens, unveils the persistent segregation mechanisms affecting Latinx residents, mirroring—though distinct from—those historically endured by African American ghettos. These neighbourhoods, often portrayed by public discourse as inherently disorganised, are shaped by a complex interplay of geo-political forces, migratory flows, and urban policies that treat the Latin presence as simultaneously invisible and threatening. Unlike the “voluntary ghettos” theorised by Louis Wirth, Magnolia Park reveals a condition of forced segregation, where the barrio becomes a paradoxical space: stigmatised by external powers yet internally cherished as a bastion of identity, autonomy, and resilience. The symbolic function of the barrio, especially in the narrative of the Mexican-American diaspora, resides in its capacity to absorb hostility while fostering collective pride and mutual care, transcending its role as a mere residential cluster. The author contends that such barrios, shaped by recurrent migratory pressures and historical discrimination, must be understood not only as urban leftovers but as vital nodes in the social fabric of American cities, embodying struggles over representation, space, and belonging. Through this nuanced portrayal, the study contributes to urban anthropology and challenges normative urbanism that ignores racialised spatial experiences, calling for greater scholarly and policy attention to the everyday lives within these invisible cities.

Trapaga, I. (2019). La ciudad latina trasterrada. El caso de Magnolia Park en Houston, Texas. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(2), 25–37.

Art-Based Urban Inquiry

In Pensar la ciudad desde la investigación en artes, Patricia Mayayo and Beatriz Cavia argue for the transformative potential of artistic research as a mode of urban inquiry capable of contesting the epistemic closures of technocratic urbanism. The authors examine how artistic methodologies—installation, performance, spatial intervention, audiovisual ethnography—can reorient how cities are perceived, problematised, and reimagined. The text operates at the intersection of visual culture, critical geography, and feminist urbanism, framing the city not as a finished product but as an ongoing process of negotiation and symbolic contestation. Drawing from their experience as curators and researchers in art-activist projects, Mayayo and Cavia underscore the capacity of artistic practices to reveal invisible urban dynamics—affect, care, micro-politics of space—that elude traditional analytical tools. Artistic research, they propose, is inherently site-specific and situated, privileging embodied knowledges and intersubjective engagement over generalisation or objectivity. In a context marked by gentrification, displacement, and commodification of space, the aesthetic becomes a tool of urban critique, not by illustrating problems, but by reconfiguring spatial experience itself. The article also reflects on pedagogical practices, showing how collaborative art-based research can activate new urban pedagogies, fostering civic dialogue and critical spatial literacy. Rather than merely inserting art into the city, the authors advocate for turning the city into a laboratory of collective imagination, where research is a form of making and knowing that resists appropriation by dominant urban regimes.

Mayayo, P. and Cavia, B. (2020) ‘Pensar la ciudad desde la investigación en artes’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), pp. 105–113. Available at: http://www2.ual.es/urbs/index.php/urbs/article/view/mayayo_cavia (Accessed: 1 August 2025).

Spatial Hegemony in Latin American Cities

Vera Córdova develops a powerful critique of urban formation in Latin America, arguing that many contemporary spatial arrangements are rooted in a colonial juridical logic—the “right of conquest”—that continues to structure ownership, governance, and legitimacy in the city. The essay draws upon postcolonial legal theory, urban sociology, and the critical writings of René Zavaleta and Aníbal Quijano to interrogate how conquest is not merely historical but ongoingly enacted through processes of displacement, expropriation, and urban disciplining. Cities, Vera Córdova contends, are not neutral agglomerations of infrastructure and capital; they are spatialised expressions of domination, built upon the erasure of indigenous geographies, peasant knowledges, and informal territorialities. The article revisits legal figures such as the “res nullius” and the “empty land” doctrine, showing how urban planning often reinscribes colonial hierarchies by masking dispossession under developmentalist or modernising discourses. Using the example of housing policies and spatial reforms in Mexican cities, Vera Córdova reveals how legal and spatial violence intertwine to marginalise the urban poor while consolidating elite control over central spaces. The concept of the “right to the city” is redefined not as an abstract humanist ideal but as a struggle against the persistence of conquest logics embedded in zoning, property regimes, and urban aesthetics. The author calls for a decolonial urban praxis that recognises alternative forms of land tenure, collective memory, and epistemic plurality, proposing a city that does not merely include, but is radically reimagined from those historically excluded.

Vera Córdova, A. (2020) ‘La ciudad y el derecho de conquista’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), pp. 70–83.

Reframing Urban Ethnography

In their review of Spatializing Culture by Setha Low, Mercedes Caravaca Barroso underscores the book’s pivotal contribution to reorienting anthropological inquiry towards the spatialities of culture. Low offers a compelling synthesis of social production and social construction of space, bridging the material and symbolic dimensions of urban life. The work proposes an expanded ethnographic methodology that incorporates embodied spatial practices, movement, sensory data, and the political dimensions of emplacement, arguing that culture is not merely enacted in space but actively constituted through it. Caravaca highlights how Low's approach transcends disciplinary silos, blending phenomenology, critical theory, and urban anthropology to offer a dynamic framework for studying cities not as static backdrops but as contested terrains of meaning, identity, and power. The book is structured as both a theoretical exposition and a methodological guide, with case studies ranging from gated communities to public parks, illustrating how ethnography must move through and with space. Particularly salient is Low’s insistence that the ethnographer's body is not a passive recording instrument but a site of epistemic co-production, enabling a more nuanced reading of urban affect and spatial justice. Caravaca notes that Spatializing Culture functions as a critical intervention in debates on urban neoliberalism, privatisation, and spatial exclusion, offering tools to analyse how power circulates through the built environment and bodily experience. This work is indispensable for scholars seeking to understand space not as a container but as a relational and politicised field of cultural production.

Caravaca Barroso, M. (2020) ‘Reseña de Setha Low (2019). Spatializing Culture. The Ethnography of Space and Place’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), pp. 141–143.

Writing the City from the Margins

In Construcciones literarias a la intemperie, Andrés Maximiliano Tosi explores how urban space is narrated from the margins, highlighting how literary texts authored by or about those in conditions of homelessness, precarity, or exclusion offer alternative mappings of the city. Tosi positions these writings as epistemic interventions that contest the dominant logics of urban intelligibility, particularly those rooted in technocratic discourse and visual abstraction. The notion of “a la intemperie”—being exposed to the elements—functions both literally and metaphorically, referencing physical unshelteredness and symbolic exposure to urban disregard. Through a meticulous literary analysis of fragments, testimonies, and autofictions, the article traces how such narratives destabilise official cartographies and recompose the city from below. These literary constructions do not merely document marginality; they produce counter-spatialities, where language serves as both a refuge and a site of resistance. The text draws on spatial theory, especially the work of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, to frame urban storytelling as a tactic of survival that reclaims voice and visibility within hostile landscapes. Tosi argues that these writings articulate a form of poetic agency, wherein narrative not only reflects spatial injustice but also imagines worlds otherwise. By foregrounding voices that are often dismissed as incoherent, unproductive, or mad, the article reveals how literature can index the city’s affective underside—its fears, silences, and ruptures. Ultimately, Tosi challenges readers to recognise the city not only as built form but as a discursive terrain shaped by those who write from precarious proximity to abandonment.

Tosi, A.M. (2019) ‘Construcciones literarias a la intemperie. Algunas reflexiones sobre el rol de la narrativa en el abordaje de las ciudades’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(2), pp. 97–104. 

The Asylum as Spatial Palimpsest

In Significación e identidad del manicomio en la ciudad, Iris Krawczyk investigates the evolving urban presence of psychiatric institutions, tracing their symbolic, spatial, and emotional resonances within the city fabric. Focusing on the Dr. Domingo Cabred Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Buenos Aires, the article articulates how the manicomio functions not only as a space of confinement and control but as a contested node in the collective urban imaginary. Drawing on theories of institutional semiotics and territorial identity, Krawczyk demonstrates how the physical marginalisation of asylums—typically built on city peripheries—mirrors the symbolic expulsion of madness from the urban order. Yet, over time, these spaces acquire layers of affect, memory, and resistance that challenge their original function. Residents of the adjacent towns, former patients, and health workers interact with the manicomio as a territorial relic, charged with both stigma and nostalgia. The study employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining historical documentation, spatial analysis, and interviews, to reveal the urban ambiguity of the asylum: simultaneously feared, forgotten, and familiar. As urban growth encroaches upon these once-isolated sites, Krawczyk argues for the recognition of psychiatric institutions as heritage landscapes, whose identities demand preservation, reinterpretation, and critical care. The article calls for urban policies that integrate mental health infrastructure not as zones of exception but as integral parts of the city—accessible, visible, and responsive to contemporary needs. In doing so, it reframes the manicomio not as an architectural anomaly but as a palimpsest of urban exclusion and transformation, demanding ethical reflection and civic remembrance.

Krawczyk, I. (2019) ‘Significación e identidad del manicomio en la ciudad. El caso del Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico Dr. Domingo Cabred (Buenos Aires, Argentina)’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(2), pp. 63–74. 

Feminist Genealogies in Urbanism

In their review of Mujeres, casas y ciudades. Más allá del umbral, Roser Casanovas and Sara Ortiz (from Col·lectiu Punt 6) foreground Zaida Muxí Martínez’s monumental contribution to feminist urbanism, which not only recuperates overlooked contributions by women in shaping domestic and urban spaces but also redefines the epistemological foundations of architectural historiography. The book is structured into ten chapters that offer a non-linear historiography, allowing for both thematic and chronological exploration. Muxí challenges the disciplinary canon by replacing the abstract categories of “architecture” and “urbanism” with experiential terms like “houses” and “cities”, privileging the everyday knowledge produced through caregiving, community building, and domestic negotiations. The work situates these contributions in a wider critique of the patriarchal logic underpinning spatial production, where the private sphere has long been devalued and feminised. The book thereby aligns itself with a growing body of herstorical scholarship, aimed at reconstructing alternative genealogies that contest dominant narratives of urban modernity. By recognising the centrality of care, the fluidity between private and public, and the value of situated knowledge, Muxí proposes a paradigm shift in how we conceptualise urban theory and practice. The authors of the review emphasise the book’s timeliness, coinciding with a renewed global visibility of feminist movements, and highlight its dual role as both academic intervention and homage to past generations of feminist thinkers and doers. This volume, they argue, is essential not only for feminist scholars but for anyone committed to building inclusive, equitable cities that recognise and honour plural spatial subjectivities.

Casanovas, R. and Ortiz, S. (2019) ‘Reseña de Zaida Muxí Martínez. (2018) Mujeres, casas y ciudades. Más allá del umbral’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(1), pp. 193–194.

Gendered Disconnections

In Women, urban space and public services: the south São Paulo case, Mariel Deak offers a compelling critique of urban planning paradigms that assume a “neutral” user, often modelled on the white, cisgender, heterosexual, economically active male. Deak's qualitative study in the peripheral regions of southern São Paulo reveals how this universalist bias in public policy exacerbates the vulnerability of women, particularly those navigating caregiving responsibilities within disjointed urban infrastructures. Drawing on feminist urban theory and grounded in three months of fieldwork, including interviews with six women, the article uncovers a stark disconnectivity between key public services—health, education, transportation—and the daily routes of women tasked with maintaining household welfare. These discontinuities are not merely logistical failures but structural injustices embedded in spatial governance. The notion of everyday mobility is central: it refers not to exceptional movement but to routine, repetitive, often invisible trajectories that shape women's lives and expose them to heightened risks, such as long commutes, unsafe passages, and inaccessible services. Deak frames these issues through a post-constructivist ontology, where policy is understood as enacted in material practices, not merely in official documents. Concepts like “lived territory” and “multiple ontologies” challenge the dominance of technical rationality and underscore the value of local knowledge and embodied spatiality. The article calls for a radical reorientation of urban governance, one that listens to and plans from the experiences of marginalised groups, particularly women, whose mobility patterns reflect broader gendered geographies of care. In doing so, it pushes for a city that is not only functionally efficient but ethically responsive.

Deak, M. (2019) ‘Women, urban space and public services: the south São Paulo case’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(1), pp. 33–44.

Extimacy and Symbolic Cartographies

In Ciudad adentro: espacio, relato y extimidad en la escritura de la ciudad, Rafael Delgado Deciga and Efrén Méndez Juárez-Salazar propose a theoretical reconfiguration of the urban experience by integrating Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly the notion of extimacy, into urban studies. They argue that cities are not only spatial orders but also semiotic and affective fields, produced and interpreted through narrative, imagery, and embodied subjectivity. The city is experienced as both familiar and foreign, internal and external, a space where the intimate bleeds into the public and where the symbolic architecture of meaning competes with infrastructural design. Drawing from literary and cultural theory, the authors frame urban territory as a discursive terrain, where the practice of naming, mapping, and narrating reconstitutes spatial legibility and identity. They posit that planning is never neutral but rather an ideological practice that constructs not only roads and zoning laws, but normative urban subjectivities. This perspective highlights how urban inhabitants resist, subvert, or reappropriate these spatial scripts through storytelling, walking, graffiti, and other performative acts that inscribe counter-narratives into the city’s surface. The urban thus emerges as a palimpsest of extimacies, where conflicting imaginaries overlap and compete for visibility. Through this lens, urban analysis shifts from description to interpretation, inviting a rethinking of the city not as a system of functions, but as a constellation of affects, texts, and desires that are continuously negotiated in the fabric of everyday life.

Delgado Deciga, R. and Juárez-Salazar, E.M. (2018) ‘Ciudad adentro: espacio, relato y extimidad en la escritura de la ciudad’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(2), pp.73–84. 

Urban Struggles under Authoritarianism

Julieta Pacheco’s article Sobrepoblación relativa, acción política y dictadura militar en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires presents a rigorous historical and theoretical analysis of shantytown organisations during the Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983), situating them within the Marxist category of relative overpopulation. Rather than framing these urban dwellers as passive victims of displacement or mere recipients of aid, Pacheco reconstructs their political agency through forms of territorial militancy, self-managed cooperativism, and the formation of the Coordinadora de Sobrevivientes de Villas de Emergencia. The author disputes the notion that such activism emerged only with the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, arguing instead that the organisational capacity of the urban poor dates back to the 1950s, intensifying under the structural violence of the dictatorship. This period, marked by mass unemployment, state-led spatial cleansing, and the erosion of agrarian rent, redefined the class position of the villa dwellers—no longer just surplus labour but a politically mobilised segment of the working class. Pacheco critiques the discourse that separates the unemployed from productive labour, asserting that the struggle for housing is an intrinsic component of the broader fight for the reproduction of labour power. The article offers a detailed account of the Plan de Erradicación de Villas de Emergencia (PEVE) and its authoritarian variants, revealing how urban policies operated as tools of discipline and exclusion, masked as sanitation and urban order. The resistance that emerged, often under the protection of church networks, demonstrates that even under extreme repression, subaltern political forms can survive and adapt. Pacheco’s work powerfully reframes the history of Buenos Aires’s urban margins as one of structural antagonism, memory, and resistance.

Pacheco, J. (2018) ‘Sobrepoblación relativa, acción política y dictadura militar en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1976–1983: las organizaciones villeras frente a la política estatal de erradicación masiva’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(2), pp. 63–71. 

Displaced Urban Imaginaries

In La ciudad latina trasterrada, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry articulates a poignant meditation on the epistemic dislocation of Latin American urban thinking when refracted through the European lens. Anchored in his own experience of exile, Etcheverry constructs a narrative that is both autobiographical and theoretical, charting the tensions between urban identity, intellectual exile, and the ideological frameworks inherited from the Global North. The text critiques how Latin American urban spaces are often analysed using imported categories—those of European modernity—without regard to their historical, affective, and political specificities. Etcheverry proposes that Latin American cities must be reclaimed as epistemological sites, where the complexities of colonial afterlives, racialised geographies, and hybrid modernities defy Western urban theory. The author reflects on Buenos Aires and other cities as spaces of impossible symmetry, simultaneously aspiring to European models and resisting them, producing a unique urban ambivalence. This ambivalence is not a lack but a generative space of thought, a trasterrada city that exists across mental, emotional, and political planes. Through this lens, exile becomes a methodology—a standpoint from which to critique both one’s homeland and the theoretical apparatuses used to understand it. The article thus performs an act of decolonial urbanism, one that situates Latin American cities not as peripheral imitations but as autonomous spaces of meaning-making. Etcheverry’s work resonates with broader calls to provincialise Europe in urban studies, foregrounding the need for a situated, affective, and politically aware urban theory from the South.

Jaim Etcheverry, G. (2019) ‘La ciudad latina trasterrada’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(2), pp. 75–80.

Roma Mobilities in Metropolitan Barcelona

In Subsistencias, persecuciones y resistencias en el Área Metropolitana de Barcelona, Óscar López Catalán undertakes a rich ethnographic investigation into the precarious livelihoods and survival strategies of Romanian Roma populations engaged in informal waste collection. Set against the backdrop of Barcelona’s expanding urban margins, the study reveals a microcosm of economic marginality, mobility regimes, and policed informality. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, López Catalán captures the voices of individuals who navigate a semi-legal trade in recyclable materials—paper, cardboard, scrap metal—constantly negotiating between opportunity and vulnerability. The logistics of subsistence are tightly interwoven with urban geography: the timing of container access, knowledge of buyer reliability, and avoidance of police surveillance become tactical calculations in a precarious labour circuit. The accounts illustrate a sophisticated knowledge of value, risk, and mobility, embedded in a transnational and intergenerational framework of family cooperation. Yet this survival economy is subject to structural criminalisation, where legal grey zones, police harassment, and territorial stigmas perpetuate social exclusion. López Catalán’s methodological sensitivity uncovers how Roma collectors re-signify the urban environment—not merely as a resource, but as a contested terrain of dignity, autonomy, and micro-political negotiation. The article challenges dominant representations of informality as disorder or deviance, instead framing it as an adaptive response to exclusionary labour markets and urban regimes. It contributes to urban anthropology by centring subaltern agency, illuminating how marginalised actors produce space, value, and meaning from the overlooked and discarded layers of the city.

López Catalán, Ó. (2018) ‘Subsistencias, persecuciones y resistencias en el Área Metropolitana de Barcelona’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(1). Available at: http://www2.ual.es/urbs/index.php/urbs/article/view/lopezcatalan (Accessed: 1 August 2025).

Framing the Border through the Lens

Brenda Isela Ceniceros Ortiz’s article Mapear la frontera: los ecos del obturador desde el borde delivers a methodological and conceptual intervention into the study of border urbanism, using Ciudad Juárez as a lens to explore the multivocality of territorial perception. Anchored in the interdisciplinary field of urban cultural studies, Ceniceros Ortiz treats the border not as a line but as a porous, affective landscape, one shaped by complex interactions between identity, geography, and memory. Her methodology combines photo walks and visual narrative analysis, allowing residents to articulate spatial meaning through images, revealing not only their surroundings but their interpretations, emotions, and claims to space. By foregrounding perception as a political act, the author challenges dominant mappings that reduce border cities to zones of exception, danger, or transit. Instead, she presents a polyphonic geography where residents produce their own cognitive maps—subjective, situated, and relational. Drawing from theorists such as Kevin Lynch, Nelly Richard, and Pablo Vila, the article highlights the imaginability of space: how personal, emotive, and cultural resonances shape our spatial orientation and identity. Photography, here, becomes more than a recording tool; it is a reflexive mechanism through which individuals assert epistemic agency and participate in the semiotic construction of their urban worlds. Thus, mapping the border is not only a spatial task but a political and symbolic one, where the act of seeing is entangled with processes of belonging, exclusion, and resistance.

Ceniceros Ortiz, B.I. (2018) ‘Mapear la frontera: los ecos del obturador desde el borde’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(1), pp.9–23. 

The Streets of Concepción

Jens Stefan Benöhr Riveros and Rodrigo Herrera Ojeda provide a nuanced exploration of urban mobility in Concepción, Chile, revealing how transportation choices shape not only spatial dynamics but also modes of embodiment, perception, and social interaction. The study contrasts the experiences of motorists and cyclists, showing how the former, shielded by their vehicles, tend towards social isolation, while the latter, exposed and in constant interaction with their environment, develop a more engaged and relational sense of the city. This dichotomy serves as a framework to understand mobility not merely as technical infrastructure, but as a socio-cultural phenomenon embedded in everyday life. Drawing on theories of urban perception and body-space relations, the authors argue that the physical act of moving through the city is a form of situated knowledge production, where users continually reinterpret and reconfigure urban space. The research highlights how affective atmospheres, spatial rhythms, and the materiality of urban infrastructure influence how inhabitants relate to each other and to their surroundings. Importantly, the article posits that transportation policies must account for these experiential dimensions, advocating for urban designs that prioritise intermodal balance, environmental sustainability, and human-scale planning. By situating mobility within the broader fabric of urban life, this study contributes to a more holistic understanding of how cities are lived, imagined, and contested on a daily basis.

Benöhr Riveros, J.S. and Herrera Ojeda, R. (2018) ‘Acelerador y pedal: la metamorfosis urbana en Concepción’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8. 

The Reclamation of Lived Space

In Etnografía desde el subsuelo, Diego Pérez López explores how peripheral neighbourhoods, often relegated to the margins of the urban imagination, serve as active sites of social production, symbolic resistance, and identity formation. Drawing heavily from Henri Lefebvre’s triadic conceptualisation of space—perceived, conceived, and lived—the article exposes the tensions between top-down spatial representations crafted by technocrats, urban planners, and state apparatuses, and the grassroots spatial practices of residents who inhabit these “mal hechos” (poorly made) neighbourhoods. Through a methodological framework that includes drifting interviews, spatial ethnography, and photographic documentation, Pérez López reveals how communities contest imposed spatial orders through daily interactions, artistic expressions, and the cultivation of urban intimacy. Activities such as street sports, graffiti, communal gatherings, and vernacular rituals are read as spatial tactics that re-embed the neighbourhood with dignity, meaning, and cohesion. The author critiques the hegemonic urban aesthetic which tends to homogenise and devalue the lived experience of marginalised communities, arguing instead for the recognition of informal urbanism as a legitimate and dynamic urban grammar. By centring the voice and agency of subaltern actors, this ethnography offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant discourse of urban decay and dysfunction. The study not only maps physical spaces but uncovers the epistemic violence inherent in spatial design and proposes an alternative urban reading rooted in co-presence, affect, and cultural vitality.

Pérez López, D. (2018) ‘Etnografía desde el subsuelo; fueron barrios que los hicieron mal hechos’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(1), pp. 79–91. Available at: http://www2.ual.es/urbs/index.php/urbs/article/view/perezlopezdiego (Accessed: 1 August 2025).

The Crisis of Spatial Justice

In examining the urban evolution of Aranjuez, Marcos García Moya presents a scathing critique of the commodification of urban territory, tracing the trajectory from the Industrial Revolution’s restructuring of urban planning to the catastrophic burst of the Spanish housing bubble. This transformation is embedded in a shift where housing transitions from a fundamental right to a speculative asset, with urban development becoming a vehicle for capital accumulation rather than social welfare. The case of the neighbourhood La Montaña, marked by overconstruction, vacancy, and socio-spatial inequality, serves as a stark representation of the failures of this speculative model. García Moya demonstrates how planning deregulation, driven by a coalition of developers, politicians, and financial institutions, enabled a frenzy of construction untethered to real social need, resulting in ghost neighbourhoods and fragmented urban fabrics. The author foregrounds how urban neoliberalism manifests through land commodification, precarious housing markets, and the erosion of urban commons. Critically, the article posits that the real estate frenzy was not an unforeseen anomaly but the logical endpoint of decades of policy favouring profit-driven urbanism. García Moya advocates for an urgent reconceptualisation of urban planning—one that reclaims its role as a public good instrument grounded in social equity, sustainability, and participatory governance. The article calls for post-crisis urbanism that challenges dominant paradigms and seeks to rebalance power dynamics in favour of community wellbeing and long-term habitability.

García Moya, M. (2018) ‘El territorio urbano y la vivienda como un negocio: el caso de Aranjuez’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(2), pp. 101–106.

Urban Dualities

The novel El Salvaje by Guillermo Arriaga serves as an entry point into the intricate socio-spatial dynamics of Mexico City during the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly through the lens of the Unidad Modelo—a middle-class housing project conceived under the utopian ideals of modernist architecture and post-revolutionary nationalism. In her article, Liliana López Levi explores how this planned urban enclave, designed to embody collective progress and national unity, is narratively deconstructed into a landscape marked by violence, alienation, and symbolic reappropriation. Through Arriaga’s semi-autobiographical fiction, the architectural order imposed by elites is juxtaposed with the lived experiences of its inhabitants, who navigate the tensions between civilisation and barbarism, categories that collapse into each other as the narrative unfolds. López Levi draws on critical theory, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer, to challenge binary notions of social order and to reveal the dialectics of urban decay and community resilience. The novel, she argues, functions as a form of urban ethnography, where fiction becomes a methodological bridge between cultural analysis and territorial critique. It does not merely reflect the contradictions of a city in flux; it actively constructs a counter-cartography where emotional, social, and symbolic mappings contest the hegemonic spatial narratives of the state. By foregrounding emplaced memory, affective bonds, and the sensory experience of the urban, the work illuminates how literature can become a site of epistemic resistance against top-down urban planning paradigms. As López Levi concludes, acknowledging such literary geographies is vital for a more inclusive and textured understanding of the city as both a physical and cultural artefact.

López Levi, L. (2018) ‘El Salvaje y la Modelo: novela, barrio y territorio en la Ciudad de México’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(1), pp. 35–47.