Marie-Noëlle Carré

Urban service provision: Insights from pragmatism and ethics

In their work and life, urban service providers are continually torn between policies and pressures from higher scales and the realities of the cities they inhabit. The ways in which they negotiate these tensions imply the complex adjudication of a range of normative issues, conditioned by the variety of socio-technical, political, and economic factors that are underscored in the literature. In this way, geographical debates on pragmatism and ethics have an important, yet largely overlooked, contribution to make to the study of urban services. These approaches can promote the careful consideration of how people engaged in service provision manage such complexity – including its normative dimensions – through their long-term embodied experience. Pragmatic and related ethical perspectives necessarily contextualize decision-making, taking us beyond ideology or institutional exigencies to debates about practical reason, everyday ethics and embodied practice.

¿El cinturón ecológico?: Análisis de una marca urbana que nunca existió

?Como un proyecto territorial no concretado en su totalidad puede inscribirse dentro de la memoria metropolitana? En Buenos Aires, el cinturon ecologico, un dispositivo que se proponia ampliar la dotacion de areas verdes y limitar el crecimiento urbano, representa un caso emblematico. Con un analisis de las estrategias del marketing urbano desarrolladas para promocionarlo durante la ultima dictadura militar (1976-1983), este trabajo desentramara como este emprendimiento metropolitano, aunque nunca terminado, se transformo en una marca para Buenos Aires. Abordara su difusion mediatica primero dentro de la puesta en escena de una crisis urbana; luego en la constitucion de un nuevo proyecto de ciudad y, finalmente, en la promocion de un equipamiento de calidad a escala regional. A modo de cierre, considerara la inversion de esta imagen, a la luz de los conflictos metropolitanos actuales.