Abstract

Research on urban imaginaries has proliferated in Latin America for the past years. However, apparently no one has tackled the issue of how the image of the city comes to be. Therefore, there is a lack of explicit propositions regarding the way in which the process of production of urban imagery could be analyzed. In this article we propose a framework for the analysis of the production of urban imaginaries, by reviewing the most relevant literature in the field, which allows us to develop what we called the "mechanics" of production of urban imaginaries. Subsequently, in order to clarify our proposal, we refer to two case studies: the "Santiago in 100 words" short-story competition and the "Vivienda y Decoracion" newspaper insert. According to our analysis, the "mechanics" of production of urban imaginaries is characterized by specific ways of representation used to depict urban environments, that due to their massive distribution, become perceptual frameworks of the city, getting fixed as the foundations for general action, giving shaping our experiences and permeating our interpretations of new imaginaries that come into place.