Call for papers 2024

Decolonizing Urban Territories
Places in Dispute:

Processes of neocolonial usurpation and intercultural proposals.

The seminar is funded by ANID project Fondecyt Iniciación 11241033

Versión en español

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Abstract submission deadline
15 August

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Acceptance of abstracts
30 August

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Seminar dates
13 – 15 November

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Seminar
application form

CALL FOR PAPERS

This call-for-papers starts from the premise that our lives and places have been shaped by violent hegemonic colonizing processes. The nation-state presents a single officially valid discourse that homogenizes identities and simultaneously creates the paradox of connecting inhabitants, but disconnecting them from their surroundings. Under this logic, the nation-state has used the processes of plan-ification, propert-ization, and patrimonial-ization following the liberal tradition of negating the existence of more complex relationships between peoples and places.

Yet different ideas of planning, property, and cultural heritage are possible. Indigenous cultures have created their own ways of understanding their territories and the elements that compose them. These ideas have been stripped of meaning for the common citizen by modernity/coloniality and the capitalist order this limiting the valid frameworks of state protection.

In order to delve into these themes, we need more than a single liberal philosophy of place. We need to establish relational dialogues between various philosophies or ways of understanding territories. The liberal vision of planning, property and cultural heritage that we are questioning here is based on the idea of a single owner who is sovereign over a unitary place, able to do (and not do) whatever they want to with these places. This premise creates a strange framework for action, determining who is entitled to make decisions in relation to planning, property and cultural heritage and what decisions they can make.

In this seminar we want to promote a dialogic, and therefore more complex and real, understanding of the various actually existing forms of planning / planification, property / propertization, and cultural heritage / patrimonialization. These depend not only on the legal rights of private liberal personhood or of benevolent bureaucracies, but are demonstrated, lived and embodied by different communities in their everyday daily actions.

Indigenous communities have lived for centuries in existential, sociocultural relationships with their territories that speak to us of different de facto uses; uses that permeate ideas such as being-with-the-territory and inhabiting-the-territory through, not legal tenure as owners, but permanent experience with and in these places. These relationships are expressed in actual practices of organization, daily work, habitual care, the reconstitution of history through oral memory, conceiving property not from an individual, but from a collective perspective along with other religious and cultural activities that are always territorialized. Because territory is not conceived only as a commodified and interchangeable piece of land defined by its delimitations, but rather by spiritual elements and a direct relationship with nature, by granting it legal and moral personality, being closely related concepts that cannot be conceived separately. This ontological connotation of territory, which has been stripped throughout colonial modernity, is much more than the simple enjoyment of a planned, propertied and protected object.

In this context, this call for papers understands that there are at least three essential dynamics for the effective incorporation of Indigenous peoples in the decision-making processes that affect them, dynamics that configure the thematic lines of this fourth version of this seminar:

1. Planning

– How do planning strategies colonize subaltern identities and indigenous peoples?

– Can state planning instruments be used to defend identities, memories and subaltern territorialities?

– What possibilities do current planning apparatuses offer to organize places of intercultural coexistence?

– Is it possible to develop intercultural proposals based on community knowledge and counter-planning experiences?

2. Property

– What new property mechanisms has the State developed to encroach on indigenous places?

– Can existing property frameworks help us reconstruct the commons?

– Is it possible to develop other concepts of property from the knowledge and experiences of indigenous peoples?

– What possibilities do current property forms offer to organize places of intercultural coexistence?

3. Cultural heritage

– Is cultural heritage simply a colonizing tool used against subaltern identities and indigenous peoples?

– Can we reestablish other collective memories within the framework of existing official cultural heritage policies?

– What kinds of cultural heritage claims exist outside institutional frameworks?