Descolonizar las epistemologías urbanas: Saber experto y colectivos por el derecho a la ciudad, ¿quién puede decir “la verdad” sobre los problemas de la ciudad?

During the last decade in Guadalajara (México), private and public actors have sought to implement different urban regeneration projects, based on the creative industries and the revalorisation of public space. Using ethnographic field work, we will analyze how this claim for public space has taken center stage in the voice of business associations and architects, together with civil society organizations and artistic interventions. Informed by decolonial critical analysis on the colonial matrix of knowledge-power relations, we highlight the role that expert knowledge and white middle class “”right to the city”” collectives have played in the constitution of public space as a renewed colonial geography of development, highly hygienist and eurocentric in character. Although conceived in the name of urban democratisation, these initiatives crystallize a normative model of public space overpassing issues related to class, race, gender, and diversity. We aim to put forward that more inclusive practices taking place in Guadalajara, that could enrich and decolonize our imaginaries regarding public space, have been criminalized by current public policy. These practices embody alternative economies and modes of production, reproduction and commoning of and in public space, and put into play alternative urban epistemologies that contest other ways of making space public.”