Changing cities from within. Emerging Urban Regulation in Post-Pandemic Latin America

Abstract

The pandemic has motivated numerous state interventions, most of them focused on mitigating the immediate effects of the emergency. Thus creating a new regulatory framework whose main objective was to safeguard the health of citizens; however, these measures also impacted urban systems, in their form and functioning. The new morality became the breeding ground for new laws and urban ordinances that sought to correct the problems rediscovered by the health situation. Therefore, this study analyzes the set of urban regulations published during the pandemic in different Latin American countries. The aim is to discover trends in the region and to assess the possibilities of structural change driven by new urban codes. The results highlight the lack of depth of these proposals; that is, their immediate and conjunctural character. With the exception of the Peruvian and Chilean cases, the rest of the countries have experimented very little in this area. However, there is a growing interest in social housing, justified by recently approved regulations. In conclusion, there is a growing interest in changing the rules of the game in the city; however, this has not been sufficiently addressed in the regulatory sphere.

Keywords: pandemic, regulation, urban planning, Latin America.