Los Impactos de las Grandes Intervenciones Urbanas en las Ciudades Latinoamericanas: Nota Introductoria

Latin American and Caribbean cities have been undergoing important urban transformations based on a set of strategies that reproduce the principle of capital accumulation. These transformations are based on techno-political discourses that promise to improve the quality of life of the population and to develop a country, a region or a city. In the socio-urban debate, the category "Major Urban Interventions (GIU)" has been coined to denote a special type of large-scale intervention, with significant economic investment and diversified impacts on cities. In general, such interventions are legitimized in concepts related to urban regeneration, renovation, revitalization or rehabilitation that connote the idea of improving economically, socially and culturally the degraded, the degenerated, the unfit and provide new uses and meanings to the territories, whether they are central, strategic or vacant. This idea, in praxis, generates a set of effects that are not necessarily consistent with the intentionality and rationale from which they start and that call into question the power relations and interests that are concealed in the official discourses. Thus, an important debate is taking shape in the interdisciplinary field of critical urban studies that questions the type of relationships between public, private and civil society actors, and the implementation and development strategies of the GIUs.