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Teorizando o espaço americano.

To study the built environment of the Americas is to deal with an inherent contradiction. While our disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that spaces matter; an overwhelming majority of our knowledge comes from another continent.
As reminded by Edward Said in the classic Orientalism of 1974, European culture developed narratives about all other societies on Earth and as a result established itself as the center of human knowledge. This essay departs from asking what could be the place of the Americas in a global history of the built environment?
One possible answer is given by Roberto Fernández in his seminal El Laboratório Americano (1997). Fernández discusses how architectural theory, to this day, treats the Americas as the a special kind of periphery that turns into an eternal laboratory, in which experiences are systematically abandoned by new ones. America thus becomes the place of modernity par excellence, of eternal novelty, a perpetual state of infancy to use ethnocentric Hegelian concept that should be outdated but insists in framing our narrative. Adrian Gorelik (1996) reinforces the idea of a laboratory, and specifically attributes to the city in Latin America the role of "a machine to invent modernity".
To debate architectural space in the Americas is to look at the American city not only as the most genuine product of Western modernity, but also as a tool to invent modernity, to extend it and to reproduce it. Thus was conceived during the colonial period, first, to locate the enclaves from which to produce the territory in a modern way; in the independent republics to imagine in these territories the nations and the States in the image and likeness of the city and its citizenship; in the processes of development, with so little time, to use it as a "pole" from which to expand modernity, restoring the rural-urban continuum according to its parameters, that is, directed to produce socially, culturally and politically modern people.
If modernity was invented in the Americas it indeed have a contribution towards revising our contemporary spatial theories.