Insurgent Urbanisms in the Americas

Insurgent Urbanisms are often seen as spontaneous, grassroots responses to the inequities embedded in urban policies, projects, and systems, operating entirely outside the structures of government. But are they truly autonomous? In Insurgent Urbanisms in the Americas, Kristine Stiphany and Edna Ely Ledesma offer a new perspective on the empirics of struggles to design cities that are inclusive and equitable.

From Brazil’s favelas to Ecuador’s barrios, and Puerto Rico’s hurricane-battered shores to the gentrified centers of U.S. cities, there have been radical struggles of the marginalized to challenge and reimagine the norms of urban planning. Over decades, these same struggles have become part of planning itself. Each chapter’s account of insurgency provides empirical detail about how acts of resistance evolve across housing occupations, grassroots knowledge-sharing, ecological revolutions. Stiphany and Ely-Ledesma provide a way of understanding how the marginalized mobilize their sociospatial systems—such as housing, markets, policies, and urban morphology—to participate in the change that is transforming their own communities. Through powerful field research and firsthand activism, contributors reveal how insurgencies not only resist but actively reshape urban orders, built environments, and public landscapes—issuing a compelling call to make urbanism matter.

This book is essential for students and instructors of urban planning and design, Latin American and Hispanic studies, and social justice studies, as well as city planning and urban design practitioners.