Environmental Issues In Urbanization

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In the last years, a lot of urban research has been done on Latin American as well as on Asian large cities, (Romero 2005, Fuchs et al. 1994, Gilbert 1996, Rakodi, 1997, Fu-Chen and Marcotullio 2001, Perlman 2011). These authors have deeply analyzed various forces for urbanization (population movements, labor force changes, social conflicts, etc), and their impact on the city's modification processes and on their ability to achieve some forms of sustainable or equitable growth. In many of these researches, environmental and socioeconomic issues are central. There are large cities, such as Bogotá or Medellín, that have been recently run well and have tried to overcome some social and environmental challenges and are slowly improving their dwelling…show more content…
The term ‘device’ is intended in a Foucaltian sense as a machinery apparatus, dispositif, which enhance different forms of power within the city trying to address, in this case, the question of how notions of just/unjust space relate to issues of densification. The configuration of these devices will help make the urban mosaic of Ecuadorian medium sized cities more comfortable, livable, spatially diversified and more socially inclusive, configuring a geography of places designed as ‘membrane’ spaces between neighborhoods inhabited by different social…show more content…
The logics construction of Latin American urban spaces are largely the output of its formal matrix described by the figure of the grid or damero (Joseph, Szuchman, 1995; Rodgers et al. 2012). It is an abstract, purely geometric space, indifferent to physical and social contexts, conceived as a replicable prototype. The grid is made of lines ideally directed towards infinity, defined by movements rather than figurations. A highly symbolic space whose signs correspond to names or numbers. It does not contain places. The desire of isotropy and the search for egalitarian settlement conditions through the abstraction of the damero is however contradicted, since the times of the first colonizations, by a particular dual condition where the utopian social order of the founded cities confronted itself almost immediately with his double, the indigenous city, sometimes planned according to specific social conditions, as in the case of the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay, sometimes built according to regular patterns and symbolic connotations. (F. Carrión,

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