Latin American urban cultural studies: unique texts, ordinary cities

Urban communication research in Latin America is not just responding to, or rejecting, Western perspectives but producing material that can be valuable for understanding arguments about ordinary cities within the context of globalisation. We interrogate current frameworks in urban cultural studies and communication theory to highlight how research in Latin America provide new possibilities for exchange and dialogues into an area of study that is often missing or limited in Western urban cultural analysis. We argue that this research moves away from theories that deemed Latin American cities as underdeveloped or unequally inserted in to the network of global cities by providing ways of narrating, imagining and understanding the city in their own terms. This research however does not go unchallenged; we also argue that Latin American capital cities are often privileged at the cost of forgetting, ignoring or just describing as traditional other Latin American cities in the region.