Reimagining Urban Safety in Latin America: An Introduction

Autor/es

Alejandra Luneke

Vania Ceccato

Resumen

This issue explores urban safety across Latin American cities as a socio-spatial, relational process shaped by the built environment, structural inequalities, governance practices, and everyday lived experiences. Sitting at the intersection of international urban theory and Latin American scholarship, it integrates perspectives from environmental criminology, feminist geography, critical urban studies, and research on urban informality and violence. Drawing on eight empirically grounded contributions from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, the issue examines how safety is produced, experienced, and contested. The findings highlight three core analytical axes: (1) the spatial production of violence and micro-geographies of care in informal settlements; (2) the gendered, age-based, and affective dimensions of safety among diverse city users; and (3) the role of mobility infrastructures, surveillance technologies, and policing in shaping uneven geographies of fear and security. Ultimately, the collection advances theoretical understandings of urban safety in deeply unequal contexts and calls for integrated, place-based urban planning policies that prioritize equity, care, and lived experience