Urban Imaginaries from Latin America, edited by Armando Silva, is a unique contribution to the broad trajectory of artistic, social, cultural, and political analyses that make up the critical...

Urban Imaginaries from Latin America, edited by Armando Silva, is a unique contribution to the broad trajectory of artistic, social, cultural, and political analyses that make up the critical project of Documenta 11. Entirely conceived and executed by Silva and his team of collaborators in fourteen cities in Latin America, Urban Imaginaries derives its uniqueness from the fact that it is neither constrained by the spatial logic of the fifth Platform of Documenta 11, which is the exhibition proper, nor by the temporal limits that defined the previous four Platforms enacted in five cities around the world. However, it shares something familiar to all the Platforms, which is the interdisciplinary map of ideas in which Documenta 11 is firmly situated.

​The basi hypothesis of this book is the idea that cities and urban formations extend beyond the physical, geographical, social, and cultural limits of historical spaces in which they are founded. Instead, the research gathered here proposes an analogous picture of the city and the urban: as spaces not so much produced concretely but imagined collectively. In fact, Silva in his pointed introductory essay questions the very assumptions of our understanding of the urban as one fixed and limited by its physical scope. He then suggests that what Henri Lefvbre has called the “social production of space” are the modalities of collective imaginings in which the urban tend to take root not just in the physical boundaries of cities, but through networks of exchange, desire, fantasy, sensorial evocations, and mediatized confrontations that give people the feeling of dwelling in the city, even though they may live their social existence either in isolation or in contradiction to the normative values of the city.

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