Invisible urbanities

Abstract

Despite the supposed visibility of the city, the urban condition remains submitted to different levels of transparency and blindness. Many invisibilities of the city refer to the informality of daily life, especially in the margins and peripheries of urbanity. Essayist in style, the text questions the responsibility of city "makers" - architects, urbanists and administrators - in this contempt for the informal side of many urban spaces and its social life. Can we plan the city's informality? A possible open city is conditioned by the availability of these actors to a closer approach to a complex reality that sociology and the social sciences have long been revealing and making visible.