Toward a Political Ontology of Urban Buen Vivir

Abstract

Having buen vivir as a theoretical horizon developed on the Global South, this article explores the possibilities it would have for understanding the contemporary city in Abya Yala. Here, political ontologies of a relational nature are positioned as possibilities for substantiating a new type of inhabiting the city, based on the communal sense. For that, we take into consideration the tensional elements of the new social movements that have emerged in recent decades, which are the same ones that demand the right to a dignified life in cities marked by the conflictive coexistence between gentrification and urban extractivism. In this sense, in this article we propose to establish a theoretical dialogue with buen vivir as a philosophy from the Global South and a fundamental component of decolonial thought. We do so by having the city as the place where we situate our thinking, having in mind the profound changes it has had in recent decades. To this end, we review the fundamental principles of the philosophy of buen vivir, while approaching a first review of the new social movements that uphold these principles and their reach in the plurinational states that have emerged in the region.