Revisiting Some Aspects of the Urban Question

Abstract

This article attempts to place some of the dimensions which characterize
contemporary social processes within the field of studies of urban problems.
By searching to break with the ethnocentric tradition which defines the
"underdeveloped urban" as the negative pole of a paradigmatic model,
central in Western Europe, the author tries to make evident the importance
of incorporating world-wide manifestations of social practices as they
appear in our society. In that sense, he critically retrieves the major issues of
the urban debates in Latin America, stressing some of their limits. At the
same time he points out the theoretical and political relevance of the studies
about present-day urban problems.