DEVELOPMENT AND URBAN INTERCULTURALITY: NOTES FOR SOCIAL WORK

Although interculturality has been a subject of reflection in anthropology, linguistics, education, philosophy and some areas of history, it has been given little consideration by the Social Sciences in general and particularly by Social Work in relation to the possibilities that interculturality can have in what today constitutes the Latin American cities. Taking up again the establishment of the first cities in the Conquest Era and the Spanish Colonization, it will be shown how the urban development is a continuity of coloniality, this time NorthAmerican and European. In this sense, urban cultural becomes a colonizing mechanism which overshadows and consolidates the asymmetry between the standardized life model and the diversities emerging from the daily routine. The intercultural dialogue can be possible as long as some categories of the modern thought such as development and citizenship and the pedagogy, exclusion and cultural diversity perspectives, which have oriented the construction of the social in the modern cities, are de-constructed.