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.
