Dream of Order. The Latin American City

Abstract

‘The birth of intelligence’ is how Ángel Rama described the Latin American city in the much-quoted opening paragraph of his essay La ciudad letrada. This opening gained fame by constructing a rhetorical figure using several apt images: the Western dream of order, he argued, in the broad cycle stretching from the destruction of Tenochtitlan (16th century) to the construction of Brasília (20th century), would have found a place to take shape in the New World. Opting for a less ambitious timeframe, 1940–1970, Adrián Gorelik (1957) sets out in this book, entitled La ciudad latinoamericana (The Latin American City), to elucidate that entelechy as a figure of twentieth-century social imagination. If Latin America was, during those decades, an advanced political project, it is in its cities—in urban transformation—that the stages of that utopia can be observed: its starting points, its developments, and its lost hopes.