Fragmented Cities: A Sociospatial Approach to Urban Discrimination

The critical analysis of urban discrimination has as its normative references a twofold system of discourses that attempts to materialize the international human rights system in the urban experience. On the one hand, there is the framework of International Human Rights Law, which essentially consists of the United Nations conventions on the rights of historically discriminated groups such as women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. On the other hand, there is the UN-Habitat project, which promotes sustainable urbanization that guarantees equal conditions for all groups that populate urban spaces, especially in developing countries. Social patterns of distribution of rights and protections, as well as structural relations of deprivation and domination, largely determine the distribution of human groups in urban space. On this basis, this chapter argues that territorial imbalances in the modern city, and particularly in the Latin American city, are generally related to the heterogeneity and inequality of access to rights experienced by urban groups, and to the relations of discrimination in which these groups are immersed. The design of cities is a clear example of the structural processes of discrimination: instead of being urban spaces that enable the exercise of rights, they often become structures that limit or even nullify them.