Pensar La Habana en el siglo XXI: mapas posibles para una ciudad cambiante: [Introduction to dossier on Havana in the 21st century]

Reading 21st-century Havana from new critical perspectives will help shed light on the new urban processes currently reconfiguring the city at material and symbolic levels. The contributions compiled in this dossier consider emerging logics of privatization, gentrification and uneven development associated to new flows of capital, which add onto long-term issues such as the chronic housing shortage affecting the city, the rigid and almost complete monopoly of the state over the production of the built environment, or the positioning of tourism as a sort of fragile monoculture which places the island – particularly in the post-COVID era – in an economically vulnerable position and which continues to reproduce forms of urban coloniality. Facing the exclusionary logics generated by the entanglements between transnational capital flows and the state, the variety of positions gathered in this dossier attempts to provide some critical answers: decolonial approaches and critical race studies, queer perspectives, feminist approaches and views that emphasize the importance of participatory design and management of urban space by the working classes all function as possible maps to explicate the complex urban processes impacting Havana in the present century.