Structure–agency duality and Latin American urbanism

Giddens in dialogue with feminisms, postcolonialisms, and territorial networks

Abstract

The diversification of social theory in the twenty-first century has reopened the debate on the relevance of the structure-agency duality for interpreting urban processes shaped by inequality, informality, coloniality, gender, and socio-material networks. Drawing on a critical theoretical review of the literature, this analysis examines Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration in dialogue with urban feminisms, postcolonial perspectives, and network studies, situating the discussion within Latin American urban processes after 2000. The review shows that structuration retains interpretive value for understanding the recursive production of space, particularly in peripheral expansion, informal settlements, housing policies, and metropolitan planning. However, it also reveals significant limitations when its categories are confronted with care practices, embodied spatial experiences, informal rationalities of planning, colonial legacies, and technological mediations that redistribute urban agency. The article contributes an articulated reading of urban social theory, in which rules, resources, institutions, and territorial practices can be analyzed without reducing the city either to structural determinisms or to local voluntarisms.