ABSTRACT
What does it mean to think of Latin American cities as cultural arenas in the internet era and amid planetary urbanization? How have digital forms of cultural mediation and the crises in lettered city paradigms scrambled and reoriented scales of belonging? What if new media supersedes not merely old media, but the very scales of environmental and urban life as we have known them? Can forms of cultural cohesion or common denominators sustain themselves amid the deep inequalities, differences, and expansiveness that mark the region's major metropolitan areas? This essay addresses those questions, among others, drawing on Milton Santos's work, and engaging in reflections about digital media, algorithms, infrastructure, financialization, urbanization, climate change, precarity, architecture, literature, and culture. While maintaining that human experience is bounded by two inevitable scales, the body and the planet, the essay argues that although we should not relinquish a commitment to the irreducibility of human subjectivities to any single or stable set of variables, we might also do well to think more carefully about yearnings for belonging.
