ABSTRACT
Unprecedented directions in the practice of heritage conservation have been sprouting throughout the Latin America territories – particularly in the informal transformations of traditional historic centers and at the core of peripheral neighborhoods and shantytowns. While, in the recent past, the mechanistic clockwork view of the world emphasized conservation strategies based on order, stability, uniformity, and equilibrium, in the contemporary Latin American city those ideas are being challenged by tactics of accelerated social change, temporality, disorder, instability, diversity, re-appropriation, disequilibrium, and non-linear relationships (in which small inputs can trigger massive consequences).
This chapter will examine the complex dynamic structure of innovative processes of urban and socio-economic reform in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico as well as in the southernmost section of the United States. The chapter emphasizes strongly the key controversy surrounding the concept that order and organization can arise out of disorder and chaos through a spontaneous process of self-organization. These tactical horizons may serve to test the limits of heritage conservation and may provide a new agenda for the protection of regions, districts, neighborhoods, public spaces, and buildings.
