Creative Spaces : Urban culture and marginality in Latin America

Abstract

This book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the different ways in which marginal urban spaces have become privileged locations for creativity in Latin America. At the most basic level creativity can be defined as the ability to produce the new. In this way, the essays within the collection engage with new art forms, political organisations and subjectivities emerging from within a range of Latin American urban spaces which can, in different ways, be regarded as peripheral or marginal. In addition, the essays the volume contains seek to understand the ways in which artists, architects and urban planners from outside such spaces have sought to harness this creativity in their own representations of, and interventions in, marginal locations. In line with the work of Henri Lefebvre, then, within the collection space is understood not only as the setting where creative processes unfold, but also as a dynamic part of those very processes, as well as its continuously changing outcome.1

We do not intend to imply, however, that creativity is the only process at work within marginalised urban spaces, nor that such spaces represent some kind of romanticised ideal of the creative potential within Latin American cities: we are well aware that cities throughout the region, and their inhabitants, face continuous and extremely urgent problems. On the contrary, the book explores the intersection of problems and complexities that lead to, or arise from, the production of the new, with a focus on the ways in which this production reveals, manifests and challenges existing tensions in Latin American space, culture and society.