The Latin American city recodified? Pandemic and emerging urban legislation

Abstract

City, like living organisms, originates from codes, structured information in the form of rules that condition the physical form and performance of urban space. Usually, the so-called urban codes clash with the spontaneous nature of the city, with the urban Kháos that contextualizes the free creation (poiesis) of human collectives. This is a comparative study focusing on the urban codes created to address the pandemic. The objective is to build an overview of these innovations in the region. The sample is made up of official norms published in pandemic, directly linked to urban planning, and building control (urban form). The countries analyzed are Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Chile. The study uncovers a shared interest in facing future urban problems, in contrast to the inconsistency of proposed legal instruments. Factors such as the lack of articulation, validity time, ambiguity, among others, accentuate this problem. Likewise, it evidences that political situation of each country has a significant influence on the development of these norms and the possibility of their long-term impact. In summary, the global emergency has produced opportunities to transform urban systems from their internal rules; however, there are very few successful examples in this field. Therefore, Latin American cities have the task of learning from this defeat to lay the foundations for a more resilient and sustainable urban future.