Urban Rights and Sustainability in Latin-America: First Steps towards Urban Justice

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A B S T R A C T The following research is based on the affirmation that urban sustainability in developing regions, such as Latin America, is an impossible goal to be totally achieved, due to the circumstances of poverty, informality (slums), corruption, violence, among others that exist there. Therefore, the urban sustainability in the cities of this region has to be reached through survival efforts that seek to balance the existing inequalities (urban justice). So, the first step to take is to detect and measure those inequalities, in order to be able to take actions to eradicate or decrease them. To do that, urban rights were chosen to be used as measuring tools for those urban injustices. The research presents five priority urban rights contextualized to the Latin-American spatiality, called the Latin-American urban rights (right to a living place, right to the public space, right to alterity, right to mobility and accessibility, and right to good government practices and public policies), that were obtained after analyzing urban and social characteristics in different cities such as Santiago, Chile, Salvador de Bahía, Brazil, and Monterrey, México.Finally, a first proposal of operationalization of the Latin-American urban rights is presented, which was applied to a case study in the city of Monterrey, México, in order to prove the efficiency of the model.

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Urban Rights and Sustainability in Latin-America: First Steps towards Urban Justice Operationalization * Dr.JAVIER ALONSO GOMEZ DAVILA Faculty of Architecture, Universidad del Valle de México, Campus Monterrey Norte, Monterrey, Mexico E mail: javier.gomez@uvmnet.edu A B S T R A C T The following research is based on the affirmation that urban sustainability in developing regions, such as Latin America, is an impossible goal to be totally achieved, due to the circumstances of poverty, informality (slums), corruption, violence, among others that exist there. Therefore, the urban sustainability in the cities of this region has to be reached through survival efforts that seek to balance the existing inequalities (urban justice). So, the first step to take is to detect and measure those inequalities, in order to be able to take actions to eradicate or decrease them. To do that, urban rights were chosen to be used as measuring tools for those urban injustices. The research presents five priority urban rights contextualized to the Latin-American spatiality, called the Latin-American urban rights (right to a living place, right to the public space, right to alterity, right to mobility and accessibility, and right to good government practices and public policies), that were obtained after analyzing urban and social characteristics in different cities such as Santiago, Chile, Salvador de Bahía, Brazil, and Monterrey, México.Finally, a first proposal of operationalization of the Latin-American urban rights is presented, which was applied to a case study in the city of Monterrey, México, in order to prove the efficiency of the model. CONTEMPORARY URBAN AFFAIRS (2019), 3(1), 132-142.https://doi.org/10.25034/ijcua.2018.4690 www.ijcua.com Copyright © 2018 Contemporary Urban Affairs. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper states that although sustainability is a concept that initially seeks to achieve a common welfare status, this hasn’t been able to be achieved due to several reasons, so it is proposed to make a critical review and a re-definition of that concept, in order to obtain more tangible tools that allow us to move forward urban justice in the contemporary city. The “traditional” concept of sustainable development that has predominated in the political, academic and cultural discourses from the past two decades has been the one of a balance between the economic, social and environmental areas that guarantees the resources of present and future generations. It is a concept born from the different crisis provoked by the industrial revolution in the XIX and XX centuries, which produced changes and consequences that have generated more negative issues than benefits to the contemporary society, such as environmental depredation, social inequalities and poverty exacerbation, uncontrolled urbanizations, social and urban fragmentation, excessive water and energy consumption, among others. But over time, the disenchantment has been constant, especially in the Latin-American region, where the expectations of sustainable development haven’t been fulfilled in their contemporary cities, which are dynamic, flexible, effective, versatile and global, but are also places of violence, poverty and injustice, with an evident polarization of wealth and power, generating new urban crisis, and a need for staking out a re-thinking of the whole sustainability concept. The sustainable development concept mentioned above, hasn’t accomplished its proposed expectations, because its trialectics of an economical-social-environmental balance has created a “global sustainability” concept, with big generalizations that are applied as a unique “recipe” to any urban problem without taking into account the particular contexts of each city. And that general concept has lost sight of the interactions and simultaneities that are produced when its three elements crisscross each other, leaving open a lot of possibilities and problems to attend. Therefore, that global concept of sustainability is an impossible goal to achieve given the mentioned urban circumstances. Different authors in the last years have suggested that the idea of urban sustainability as has been presented, is a utopia (Ruano, 2000) for different reasons, being one of them, that, because the general concept of sustainability refers to a state of balance, in which its economic, social and environmental elements remain stable, it is impossible to apply it to any city environment, which is anything but stable, static and balanced, due to its dynamic, changing, hybrid, and unstable nature. That is why the efforts to achieve sustainability in the contemporary city don’t have to be directed to balance their elements, but to shorten the distance between them, trying to adjust the spatial injustices presented in each specific context. Another aspect to establish is that, in order to shorten that distance between the economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainability, it is necessary to complement its traditional approaches, which are mostly thought in quantitative terms, that is, the sustainability levels are measured in numeric units (poverty index, CO2 tons in the atmosphere, deforested hectares, gross domestic product, population census, etc.), which is good and useful, but it needs a qualitative counterpart that can analyze and measure the people and their daily life processes, as well as the aspects of their culture, identity, and the spatial manifestations generated in their different urban geographies. That is why, it is proposed, that contemporary urban sustainability has to be measured also in spatial units, justice units, and urban rights that allow us to monitor the relationship between people and their built environments, and with that, help to increase dignity and spatial justice in those environments, contributing to achieve “feasible levels of sustainability”. When the contemporary sustainability concept ceases to be only “global”, and can have a “local” complement that contextualizes it into the different cities’ spatialities, and in the moment when the sustainable analysis opens its trialectics (economical-social-environmental) and includes justice and considers it as a qualitative counterpart, then, we could talk about a “feasible” and “achievable” sustainability. 2. A proposal for an updated urban sustainability concept To redefine the idea of sustainability, to a more updated concept, and transform it into an operable concept, that can be useful for urban issues interventions, the first step is to “spatialize” it, in the same way as Edward Soja did it with the concept of justice (Soja, 2010), that is, to generate a consciousness that the geographies in which we live in, can be changed and reconfigured, and with that new consciousness, to “land” the concept from the abstract, to a more specific contexts of the contemporary urban life, giving it different scales (local, regional, national, global), which will allow us to explore strategies to move towards fairer geographies. The new concept of sustainability has to have the first name “urban”, so that, when we talk about urban sustainability, we will be talking about a spatialized sustainability, not of a concept that belongs to ecology, economy, or sociology.

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