Andrea Garfinkel-Castro, doctoral candidate, “Unpacks” Latino Urbanism

August 25, 2021 by admin
Policy/Legislative

Unpacking Latino urbanisms: a four-part thematic framework around culturally relevant responses to structural forces

This article unpacks literature on Latino Urbanism to identify a holistic, thematically organized framework for understanding Latina/o sociospatial practices and to suggest how planners might plan for and/or better support Latino Urbanisms. Cultural expressions in response to structural forces that have and continue to challenge, oppress, and marginalize Latino communities in the U.S. form four thematic fundamental to Latino Urbanisms – spatializing translocal economies, embedding mobility, functionalizing housing, and enacting place. Through education and training, planners come to accept Anglocentric practices and aesthetics as normative, in contrast to the sociospatial practices of Latino communities, which become otherized and marginalized as Latino Urbanisms. Additionally, as “enacted environments,” Latino Urbanisms appear relatively unamenable to a formal paradigm. There are nonetheless planning and policy responses that planners can take to support Latino communities and in the enactment of Latino Urbanisms, and to enhance the qualities of sustainability and resilience inherent to Latino Urbanisms.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17549175.2021.1953111?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Andrea Garfinkel-Castro

Andrea Garfinkel-Castro is a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah. Her doctoral research probes planning culture – the ideas and beliefs planners hold in their minds about what the work planners is and how it should be carried out. She takes a critical approach to asking how planning culture fits in with the other cultural tribes that planners belong to. She is initiating a long-term transportation research project engaging planning faculty and students throughout the U.S. and around the world intended to address a research gap on low cost pedestrian safety measures by developing a collaborative research protocol to use in a wide range of cultural and economic settings.