Revistarquis

Precarious mobility: experiences of platform delivery people for the GAM of Costa Rica

Gustavo Adolfo Jiménez-Barboza — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

The article, from an urban sociology perspective, explores the precarious mobility experienced by platform workers in the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM) of Costa Rica. The interactions of these people with the bicycle as a means of transport, its impact on sustainability and resilience, as well as the implications for their body, health and mobility were investigated. Their experience of the city, the relationship with platform companies and other key players, such as clients and co-workers were also analyzed. The theory selected to study the mobility dynamics and experience was motility, since it focuses on understanding how people gain or lose mobility capital through their disputed capitals in the city. The aim of this analysis is to comprehend the geographic and social dynamics that surround these workers, and to promote critical reflection on their displacement, work and life conditions. The methodology used for this research is qualitative, based on exploration and ethnographic interviews, as well as semi-structured interviews with delivery people.

From informality to urban formality in GAM social interest condominiums: adaptations, challenges and lessons for housing policy

Paulo César Hidalgo Cortés, Carolina Inés Pedrotti Bruno — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

In the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM) of Costa Rica, the production of social interest condominiums financed by the state housing subsidy system has become the alternative housing solution, from public policy, for people in conditions of poverty. The development of these figures —legal and spatial— has implied a real change of life for those who have historically had to face urban informality and survive in precarious settlements. This change begins with a process of breaking the previous way of living, to incorporate and then “adapt” to another way, thought from formality, which is not always appropriate for the residents; that is, it does represent lives as a virtuous change, at least in some respects. This gives rise to the emergence of different types of conflicts, adjustments and/or consensus building by residents in the new environment, which can even lead to processes of return to informality in an environment of formal origin. The study of these experiences generates learning for housing policy. The work identifies those aspects proposed by the formality in the condominiums that have generated neighborhood conflicts, discusses these learnings, and analyzes how they could be rescued as lessons.

Gradations of domesticity. Representations in contemporary literature and film

Carolina Sanabria — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

This argumentative text is an academic reflection on an interdisciplinary topic that articulates areas of architecture, history, literature and cinema, and domestic interiors. According to a corpus of literary texts from the 20th century and films from the 20th and 21st centuries, the aim is to problematize nature of the house and overcome the traditional paradigm that conceives it as a traditional space of the intimate or private sphere as safe compared to the outside space, more linked to the public sphere and of insecurity. In contemporary domesticity there are a series of spaces that are configured more intimate and others more social. The analysis of the spaces of the corpus attempts to show the evolution of a concept and a practice that dates back to the 17th century when domesticity began. The house, at the time, was far from becoming an undifferentiated or uniform space in itself, since the representation of the domestic configures new dynamics between security and hostility, public and private. In a way, the aim is to build a framework that allows the analysis of social spaces in intimacy, as a theoretical tool for interdisciplinary and analytical work.

Theorising By Doing: Experimental Pedagogies in the Teaching of Architecture Theory

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

There is consensus that theory is a key ingredient for the practice and thinking of architecture nowadays. However, theory seems stranded at the margins of the architectural curriculum, somehow disconnected from everyday life. This is even more so at undergraduate level. In most cases, architectural theory courses are elective, taught separately from studio practice, hands-on workshops and architectural design. Given this situation, it is necessary to build more experimental pedagogical approaches when teaching architectural theory. This theoretical content should be transversally integrated in the curriculum throughout, expanding the pragmatist scope of the learning by doing school (John Dewey) and implementing a new pedagogical approach based on what we call theorizing (architecture) by doing (artistic spatial practices). This article discusses the implementation of this pedagogy in one undergraduate course taught at Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM), in Mexico. The findings include a critical approach to ‘anthropophagy’ as an alternative methodology for teaching Modern Latin American Architecture, and a commentary on how architectural theory could be taught in the future.

The canning heritage of the Port neighborhood of Mar del Plata. Problems and potentialities from a socio-productive and typological valuation

Mariana Fernández Olivera, Lorena Marina Sánchez — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0600

The treatment of port industrial heritage constitutes a problem that emerges in the last decades of the twentieth century from the restructurings produced in the ports and the associated transformations of their environments. In this sense, the Puerto neighborhood of the city of Mar del Plata —Argentina— is significant. Of particular interest is what happened with the development of the fish canning industry, in its heyday between the 1930s and 1960s, since it promoted a unique manufacturing deployment that still survives in different scales and states. This heritage is the one that is valued, from the socio-productive processes and its associated typological condition, in order to analyze problems and potentialities that allow channeling appropriate actions for its preservation. To do this, we work from a qualitative approach through written, planimetric and photographic archives, together with on-site surveys and testimonials of interviews with key actors