Sam Halvorsen (Queen Mary University of London) and Adriana L. Massidda (University of Sheffield)
Spanish language version available at: / Versión en español disponible en:
The emerging global conjuncture (see Hart 2024)—ever-tilting to a far-right revanchist populism as a “response” to multiple coalescing socio-ecological crises—poses acute challenges to popular neighbourhoods in and beyond Latin American cities (see, for example, Woolston and Mitchell 2025). The starting point for this intervention is the need to better visibilise and articulate their demands, situating them in historical and geographical perspective. Recent publications in Antipode have highlighted the real dilemmas in mobilising the lived experiences of popular sectors and articulating them within a broader political project without losing the agency forged through their own spatial biographies (Halvorsen and Angelcos 2025; Magalhães 2023) as well as other creative means of resisting electoral trends (Páv 2025). This is further confounded by large-scale projects to “upgrade” informal settlements in which popular participation is readily reduced to tick-box exercises.
This (audio)visual intervention engages audiovisual materials as a prompt to explore how the future(s) of popular neighbourhoods can be conceived in ways that take crisis narratives seriously (of climate disaster, displacement, violence, economic collapse, and political uncertainty), but also that open up possibilities of incremental improvement (whether technocratic and/or participatory) and utopian thinking. By “popular neighbourhoods”, building on Azuela (1993), Connolly (2017), and Streule (2020), among others, and echoing the term barrios populares which many movements in the region use, we refer to the (often marginalised) living spaces of the urban poor, who constitute a majority locally and globally (Campbell-Stephens 2021; Simone 2022). Our intervention centres around five videos, each of which have been either co-produced with residents and activists of popular neighbourhoods, or are currently being shared and debated with them.
In framing this intervention, we posed a series of questions for authors to explore, and to which two discussants are encouraged to respond to in their final reflection (these were initially shared via a roundtable at the Society for Latin American Studies Annual Conference at Bristol, April 2025):
What futures are being envisioned for Latin American cities, and how do the living spaces of the urban majorities feature in them? How are actors in the region (movements, governments, professionals, individual residents) thinking about these neighbourhoods, and how are their visions of future scenarios (Tyszczuk 2021) conveyed? What roles do climate and other crisis narratives play in these imaginaries?
The first intervention reflects on a video that was co-produced by the Roca Museum in Buenos Aires—with an interest in documenting popular histories of railway communities—together with residents of a small informal settlement whose history is tied to workers that settled alongside the city’s railway tracks since the 1930s. The second video, by Gabriel Silvestre, highlights how communities in Rosario (Argentina) respond to exclusion and displacement through creative territorial defence. The third intervention, by Philipp Horn, reflects on a docu-fiction directed by four Aymara youth activists in El Alto (Bolivia)—with an interest in capturing their everyday lives and future visions in this city characterised by multiple crises—in collaboration with Philipp Horn and Olivia Casagrande from the University of Sheffield as well as researchers from the Bolivian NGO Instituto de Investigación y Acción para el Desarrollo Integral (IIADI). The fourth video is presented by Penelope Anthias in collaboration with residents of Urukurenda (located at the edge of the Tariquía Reserve in Southeast Bolivia) in support of their struggle to gain legal personhood as an Indigenous community. Finally, Adriana Massidda picks up a short film produced in 1970 as audio-visual propaganda for the dictatorship self-styled Revolución Argentina. The videos are followed by short interventions from Paul Merchant and Naomi Milner.
[1] Visibility and Upgrading from the Margins—Sam Halvorsen (Queen Mary University of London)
“Esta es mi casa” (“This is my home”)
—Museo Roca. Secretaría de Cultura. Presidencia de la Nación. Programa Recoleta para armar Barrio Saldías (2022, 15 minutes, in Spanish with English subtitles)
The documentary seeks to chart the untold history of a neighbourhood that is largely unknown by residents of the city, especially those in the upper-class neighbourhood Recoleta where the Roca Museum is based, in order to present some of the future imaginaries of the neighbourhood. At heart is an ambition to be recognised as an integral part of the city’s territory and receive the necessary economic and political commitment—summarised through desires for urban upgrading—that the residents deserve.
My own research with the neighbourhood Barrio Saldías has sought to chart strategies of popular participation in Buenos Aires from a positionality of marginality: with the neighbourhood falling outside the purview of either of its neighbours: the elite Recoleta and the large informal settlement Villa 31. As an invisible popular neighbourhood, they have a dual struggle to be recognised as legitimate identity in the urban terrain and a deserved recipient of funding being channelled into major projects of “slum upgrading”. Audio-visual representation of the neighbourhood has become one demand that myself and scholar-activists have sought to support. Alongside the co-produced video was a temporary exhibition in the Roca Museum, as well as several urban interventions such as turning an old train wagon into a cultural centre and hiring local artists to transform public space, recognising local biographies. Further, a book co-produced with residents and published in Spanish aims to build further momentum over the neighbourhood.
The video traces the remarkable history of a neighbourhood that is integral to the history of the city—and indeed the nation—forming a key part of its heritage as a railway community. There remain some silences, notably regarding recent migrants to the neighbourhood that have enriched it with new political and social dimensions while also posing new tensions of political representation. What brings together residents and a range of “external” actors—political party leaders, local councillors, city legislators, and others—is a shared commitment to transforming urban territory (see Halvorsen and Mauro 2025). A key element to this is visibilising the neighbourhood, its popular histories and identities, and supporting its future strategies for urban upgrading.
[2] “Planificando Territorios Populares” (“Community-Led Planning”)—Gabriel Silvestre (Newcastle University)
Episode 1 “Nuevo Alberdi, Rosario, Argentina”
Episode 2 “Frenando desalojos en la periferia” (“Halting Evictions in Urban Peripheries”)
—Directed by Gabriel Silvestre, Urban Prefigurations (2025, 7 and 8 minutes, in Spanish with English and Portuguese subtitles)
These two videos form part of the eight-episode web series “Community-Led Planning”, which documents the practices of social movements and community organisations across three Latin American cities. Produced for the launch of Urban Prefigurations (Prefiguraciones Urbanas)—a collaborative platform for sharing tools and experiences developed by grassroots and municipal actors—the series aims to promote democratic and sustainable urban transformation.
The platform emerged from ongoing debates within the global municipalist movement, particularly those catalysed by the Fearless Cities network (see Russell 2019), which has convened international gatherings since 2017, including a 2022 edition in Rosario, Argentina. While these events fostered valuable exchanges, they also revealed the need for a more permanent and accessible space for mutual learning around territorial practices, local policies, and community-led governance.
The videos highlight how communities respond to exclusion and displacement through creative territorial defence. Beyond documenting resistance, they showcase how collective action leads to tangible improvements in living conditions. The first video focuses on Nuevo Alberdi, a peripheral neighbourhood in Rosario, where residents—supported by the GIROS movement—formed a Popular Assembly in response to devastating floods in 2007. Their mobilisation secured emergency support and pressured the municipality for long-term infrastructure. When plans for gated developments threatened displacement, residents and activists co-developed a city ordinance to prohibit such projects. The second video chronicles the successful campaign that led to its unprecedented approval in 2011.
The platform and videos were produced by the research project Contested Territories in partnership with Fundación Ciudades Sin Miedo. Additional episodes featuring territorial experiences from Santiago de Chile and Belo Horizonte will be released in the second half of 2025.
[3] Aymara Youth Imaginaries for Just Cities—Philipp Horn (University of Sheffield)
“Las raíces adelante” (“The Roots Ahead”)
—Directed by Estela Maldonado, Helen Mamani, Eliana Tancara and Soledad Tancara (2023, 30 minutes, in Spanish with English subtitles)
Focusing on El Alto (Bolivia), the docu-fiction “Las raíces adelante”—directed by four Aymara youths in collaboration with UK and Bolivian researchers—explores Indigenous youth visions for just and sustainable cities. While Bolivia’s 2009 constitution is celebrated internationally for promoting Indigenous rights and decolonisation, research to date highlights gaps between rhetoric and domestic policy practice, emphasising how the Bolivian state continues extractivist policies and often frames cities—home to many young, self-identified Indigenous people—as non-Indigenous spaces.
El Alto’s urban Indigenous youth face multiple challenges, including systemic ethno-racial discrimination and limited socio-economic opportunities despite high levels of education. Young Indigenous women are especially vulnerable to domestic violence and sexual harassment. Yet, these youth have not lost hope, but actively reimagine urban futures from the popular neighbourhoods and markets in which they live, work, and spend their free time.
In “Las raíces adelante”, the four young Aymara directors’ journey through El Alto, sharing personal stories and exploring how their peers navigate a city shaped by multiple crises. The film highlights how Aymara youth creatively blend ancestral traditions with popular culture to reclaim urban space from an Indigenous perspective. As detailed elsewhere (Casagrande and Horn 2023), the film makes use of participatory video techniques, fictional scenes, and an Aymara film aesthetic aligned with Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2018) concept of ch’ixi. This approach opens space for Indigenous youth to express alternative urban imaginaries grounded in both tradition and transformation, capable of connecting their and their people’s past, present, and future.
[4] Extractivism, Coloniality, and the Politics of Recognition—Penelope Anthias (Durham University)
“Urukurenda: En búsqueda de la Tierra Sin Mal (Ĩvĩ Maraëï)” (“Urukurenda: In Search of the Land Without Evil [Ĩvĩ Maraëï]”)
—Directed by Penelope Anthias (2025, 34 minutes, in Spanish with English subtitles)
This documentary film was made in collaboration with residents of Urukurenda (located at the edge of the Tariquía Reserve in Southeast Bolivia) in support of their struggle to gain legal personhood as an Indigenous community. It narrates the community’s foundation by Guaraní and Quechua migrants fleeing debt peonage in the haciendas of the Chaco, and their struggle to build a better life for themselves and their children in the face of local landowner opposition, state abandonment, and environmental crises. The arrival of oil companies in 2022 has created additional barriers to recognition, as Indigenous legal personhood is now associated with rights to prior consultation on extractive projects in two of Bolivia’s most important new gas fields.
While not an “urban” story per se, the film resonates with others in this collection by highlighting how struggles for recognition and formalisation condition access to infrastructure and public services—and, ultimately, the viability of particular settlements and collective life projects. Indeed, decades of neglect by local authorities has led comunarios of Urukurenda to temporarily resettle in the roadside village of San Antonio, where their children can access schooling, but where they have limited access to land. It is hoped that state recognition will lead to infrastructural investments, such as a road, school, and water supply, that make possible their return.
[5] Eradication Ambiguities and Experimental Film-Making—Adriana Massidda (University of Sheffield)
“El principio del fin”
—Directed by Ricardo Alventosa (1970, 17 minutes, in Spanish; please note that the film starts at 4:00 in the available link; I thank Valeria Snitcofsky for introducing me to this film)
This short film was produced as propaganda for the self-styled Revolución Argentina, a dictatorship which ruled the country between 1966 and 1973 and whose principal leader was Juan Carlos Onganía. It was intended to present in a positive light a plan of compulsory evictions that sought to eliminate all the villas or popular neighbourhoods of the metropolitan area of BA in a large-scale operation. Justified through the theories of modernisation and marginality, the plan (against all concrete evidence) understood villas and their residents as economically stagnant and culturally backwards, and it was vehemently resisted by them.
The short was commissioned, paradoxically when coming from a right-wing dictatorship such as Onganía’s, to a left-wing filmmaker, Ricardo Alventosa (Ramírez Llorens 2016). The soundtrack is by famous tango composer Astor Piazzolla. With these ingredients, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in its overall message, the short does not end up “selling” the plan very convincingly—on the contrary, it seems to raise doubts, uncertainties, and anxieties. First, there is an ambiguous script delivered by the voiceover, which in addition at times contradicts the dictatorship’s narrative. Moreover, the short presents meant-to-be interviews where the new houses are praised, but interviewee’s lips are out of sync with the sound, so we do not know who is actually speaking, nor what the people on camera are saying. So, in its attempt to promote the dictatorship’s imagined future city as one without villas through experimental film-making techniques, the material opens fundamental questions about residents’ positions.
Commentary 1—Naomi Milner (University of Bristol)
I was deeply privileged to be invited to commentate on this wonderful dialogue between filmic imaginations, research and reflection, and the in-person panel developed further my sense of how specifically film—as a medium that operates through framing diverse elements; through linking and delinking; through bringing into relation sound, image, concept, speech—can intervene on the ways we think and imagine the world. In this context, not only the interventions themselves, but the ways their interlocutors cut, framed, and discussed them, and the changes in seeing-feeling that began to emerge, recalled the work of philosopher of politics and aesthetics Jacques Rancière. While Rancière engages almost exclusively with European cities and the Euro-western aesthetic imagination, his concept of the “distribution of the sensible”—the regime of aesthetics and sense perception that determines whose voices and experiences are visible and audible, and whose are relegated to mere “noise” (Rancière 2004)—also opened up avenues of thought in relation to the material we were seeing. This, for me, aligns with the focus across the commentaries on the way the urban fabric is organised, keeping particular parts in their places—and yet, at any moment, can be reimagined and rethought, through introducing new subjects and new objects, rendering visible what had been out of sight, and framing new interlocutors as political speakers. Yet what matters is not the intention of the filmmaker but the way the films are audience—in this case, via the commentaries themselves—which in turn contributes toward reconfiguring the “sensory frames” through which common experiences can be apprehended (Rancière 2006).
From this perspective, the audiovisual pieces gathered here, which range from a 1970 propaganda short to recent participatory documentaries, ask—in different ways—who gets to appear in the city’s built or visual narrative, and on whose terms. For instance, Adriana Massidda points out how “El principio del fin” employs deliberately ambiguous techniques, such as mismatched lip-sync and contradictory voiceovers, to create anxieties about forced displacement. Even though it was produced by Argentina’s dictatorship as propaganda to justify slum eradication, these aesthetic techniques, revisited, may inadvertently amplify the voices they aimed to silence. Likewise, “Esta es mi casa” (2022), co-produced by the Museo Roca with residents of Buenos Aires’s informal Barrio Saldías, documents a hidden railway settlement’s history and aspirations. Sam Halvorsen shows how such interventions can render a formerly invisible neighbourhood legible as an integral part of the city, asserting a right to urban upgrades and political recognition. Meanwhile, “Las raíces adelante” (2023), a docu-fiction co-directed by Aymara youth (with researchers Philipp Horn and Olivia Casagrande) steps into a domain we could call decolonial aesthesis: bringing together ancestral cosmologies, poetry, and everyday scenes of El Alto it enacts the city in a recombined, fresh way. Indigenous young people frame their own urban futures on their own terms, refusing to be confined by the state’s modernist visions. Collectively, these films and their accompanying texts urge us to reconsider how visual (and sensory, or beyond-visual) practices can rearticulate urban margins—not as absences, but as sites of active and contested presence.
Commentary 2—Paul Merchant (University of Bristol)
These videos showcase the widely varying (and sometimes conflicting) forms of address that the audiovisual medium affords. Some privilege direct testimony, others rely primarily on archival footage and archival documents, or “direct cinema”-style handheld footage without voiceover, or the affective power of extra-diegetic music. Others make more explicit use of the voiceover as an interpretative guide for the spectator. Even then, the elements can be in conflict—as in “El principio del fin”, where the voiceover cannot eradicate the uncertainty engendered by what the spectator actually sees, and on occasion the distinct formal elements seem out of sync. This is an extreme case of a function that the audiovisual image always has: that of mediating between the affective and the evidentiary, and between the personal and the institutional. A more explicit recognition of contradiction or at least contrast in the encounter between the camera and the city is visible in some of the more recent examples, not least “Las raíces adelante”.
As well as deploying varied formal approaches, the videos depict a wide range of spaces and cultural and historical contexts, from the legacy of visions of industrial modernity in Argentina in “Esta es mi casa” to contemporary migration in Bolivia in “Urukurenda”. It is therefore difficult to generalise about the role of the audiovisual medium in articulating possible urban futures, other than to say that these are visions of the future deeply rooted in the past. I mean this not only in the sense that video by its very nature always presents us with something already past, but that questions of collective memory and cyclical indigenous temporalities (as in “Las raíces adelante”) are accorded structural significance. The diversity and geographical scope of these pieces—and it would be easy to think of many correlates across time and across the region—reminds us of the prevalence of inequality and precarity in Latin America, but also of the remarkable political and practical creativity with which people respond to challenging circumstances.
One final connecting thread between these works is their positing of the relation between video and urban housing as a relation between two different forms of media. Both the audiovisual image and the urban fabric are mechanisms for the “distribution of the sensible” in Rancière’s (2004) terms: both undertake operations of framing, cutting, and recombination. And both, in contemporary Latin America, have lost some distinctiveness, as peripheral urban areas blur into the rural, and audiovisual media are entangled in broader social and digital media ecologies. The potential of these pieces stems from their embrace of the resulting ambiguity and complexity as a source of creative aesthetic and political thinking.
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Featured image: still from “Planificando Territorios Populares” (“Community-Led Planning”), Episode 1, “Nuevo Alberdi, Rosario, Argentina”