Urban History, Territorial Planning and ‘Ordenamiento’ in Latin America: A Revisit from EURE, 1970-2025

Abstract

Relying on the context of urban and planning historiography in Latin America, this article aims at exploring how, throughout the EURE journal’s history, from 1975, stages marked by political, epistemological and editorial changes can be distinguished. After the Latin American agenda of urban themes, partly framed by ECLAC and other continental bodies, the September 1973 coup brought about some abandonment of the agonist approaches which were frequent during the Unidad Popular years. A second stage seemed to be marked by the journal’s long process of becoming more specialized, sectorial and technical for the rest of the century, largely guided by Carlos De Mattos as director, until the journal’s arrival to the casuistic unfolded during the last lustrums of the third stage, representative of an urbanism heading into planning and ‘ordenamiento’, while urban, territorial and environmental studies have undergone epistemic, methodological and scalar changes. All these themes and stages are tried out on the basis of the informational and statistic corpus provided by the journal, including the most cited articles.