Imaginario (A. Huffschmid)

We not only have the physical experience of the city, we not only walk or feel in our bodies the meaning of walking around for a long time, of travelling by bus, of standing up, of being out in the rain waiting for a cab; but we also imagine, while travelling, we construct suppositions about what we see, about the people crossing our way, the zones of the city that we do not know but have to pass through in order to get another destination; in a word, about what is happening to us in relation to the others in the city (Garcia Canclini 1999:89)

"Imagination in urban contexts, as a socially shared level, articulates social desires, feelings, fantasies and explanations related to city life. The outcome of collective imagination was conceptualised by Armando Silva, García Canclini and others as urban imaginario. It is the imaginario, as a key dimension of the sociocultural and semiotic constitution of the city, where social meaning and memory, senses of community and belonging, inclusions and exclusions are produced and negotiated. The imaginario approach relativizes and complements - without replacing - the weight of material features (socio-economic condition, built environment, urban planning) by incorporating immaterial dimensions such as semiotics, subjectivity and aesthetics in order to recreate the symbolic territoriality and cultural power relations in and of the city. [...]

(bifurcaciones.cl)

Exploring imaginarios means focusing on how the city is perceived, conceived and lived by the citizen, as the inhabitant and user of urban space; and incorporates into the analysis his or her subjective "spatial experience". This spatial subjectivity does not emerge directly from the physical or visual experience of space, but is created by sense-making narratives: a sequence of imagining, experimenting and telling space. These narrations can be analyzed on the level of artistic practices (music, literature, visual arts) as well as [...] on the level of social or urban practices, inscribed in the routines and disruptions of urban life. 

[...] imagination or subjectivity here are not to be reduced to the level of individual cognition or psychology, but to the amplified as "socially shared" imagination, on the grounds of a socially shared culture seen as a "flexible and invisible cage in which one's own conditioned freedom might be exercised" (Carlo Ginzburg 2000). Stating the social dimension of imaginarios is to acknowledge the intrinsic interrelation of the social and symbolic organization of urban life, the interconnectedness between material and immaterial dimensions, the impact of architecture and physical texture on perception and imagination. Within the "flexible and invisible cage" of culture, urban subjectivity is produced by and at the same time produces social experience in the city, including the exercise of cultural power such as community-building, identity politics or boundaries of exclusion. Imaginarios are to be seen as products of specific historical and cultural processes as well as the producers of the urban, such as for instance the proliferation of urban fear, the use of public transport or environmental behaviour, the perception of informal commerce or urban "otherness", disputes over cultural heritage and memory practices in general."

Huffschmid, Anne (2012) From the City to "lo Urbano": Exploring Cultural Production of Public Space in Latin America. Iberoamericana, Año 12, No. 42. pp. 123-124.

The Informal City (E. Duhau)

"Dwellings are built and improved step-by-step, depending on household savings and informal loans, and often in response to changes in family size or the incorporation of another, related household unit (usually formed by a male child). In this latter case it is common to build a small new dwelling on a still-free portion of the original plot. Many times, housing incorporates commercial or workshop uses, or the original household builds one or more rooms or small rental apartments at ground level or on a second story. In fact, the combination of housing with commercial, service, or workshop uses, or with the production of rental units, is one of the main factors responsible for the improvement of average socioeconomic conditions in the informal city over time. Other explanatory factors include access to high school and college for many of the initial inhabitants' children and the gradual arrival of better-off households as the colonia upgrades.

Besides housing, new land uses are gradually incorporated in response to growing demand for retail commerce, consumer services, and public facilities (grocery stores, churches, schools, medical clinics, and so on). The spatial distribution of these activities is usually oriented by the emergence of some local commercial districts, mostly corresponding to one or more main streets and to the paths followed by public transport.

trasfondoinformativo.blogspot.com

In spite of the rather low quality and reduced variety of most public spaces, they are usually intensively used and traversed, most of all by housewives buying staples and bringing their children to and from school, or by kids and teenagers playing and socializing. This markedly contrasts with what we can observe in the formal city, where, with the exception of some areas of the old central city, most people avoid public walking as much as possible, and kids are usually not allowed to stay and play in public streets. Additionally, in many colonias populares, local streets are from time to time the scenes of family parties, where neighbours usually are welcome if not expressly invited. And one or more wider streets are converted into a weekly market place, where a tianguis (street market) is set out, and people from the colonia or nearby ones not only buy a wide range of goods but also, especially during the weekends, go for a stroll, eat popular dishes at antojitos (snack) stalls, and socialize. The other side of the coin is that the uses of public spaces are regulated by customs of urbanity that suppose, in order to avoid neighbourhood conflicts, the acceptance of different kinds of mishandlings concerning the uses of the streets and sidewalks."

Duhau, Emilio (2014) "The Informal City". In: Cities from Scratch. Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press. pp 155-156.

The Right to the City (D. Harvey) I

"The city, the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is:

man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.

The right to the city is not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart's desire. We need to be sure we can live with out own creations (a problem for every planner, architect and utopian thinker). But the right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious of all human rights. The sheer pace and chaotic forms of urbanization throughout the world have made it hard to reflect on the nature of this task. We have been made and remade without knowing exactly why, how, wherefore and to what end. How then can be better exercise this right to the city?

The city has never been a harmonious place, free of confusions, conflicts, violence. Only read the history of the Paris Commune of 1871, see Scorsese's fictional depiction of gangs of New York in the 1850s, and think how far we have come. But then think of the violence that has divided Belfast, destroyed Beirut and Sarajevo, rocked Bombay [...]. Calmness and civility in urban history are the exception not the rule. The only interesting question is whether the outcomes are creative or destructive. Usually they are both: the city is the historical site of creative destruction. Yet the city has also proven a remarkably resiliant enduring and innovative social form.

But whose rights and whose city?" 

Harvey, David (2003) "The Right to the City". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Published in: Lin, Jan & Mele, Christopher (2013) The Urban Sociology Reader. London: Routledge. p 429.