David Foster

Foster's method is to treat a city's cultural production as a fully valid urban document. A novel, a film or a series of photographs says things about a neighbourhood that appear in no census: who can walk there, what is feared, what is remembered and what is kept quiet. Applied to Buenos Aires, the procedure is especially illuminating for the dictatorship years and their mark on space.

His other contribution was to bring gender and dissident sexuality into Latin American urban studies. Foster documented the gay and lesbian geographies of Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Mexico City — the bars, the parks and the streets that worked as territory — and showed that an urban history excluding them leaves out a considerable part of those cities' life.

David William Foster, born in 1940 and dead in 2020, was a professor at Arizona State University for more than fifty years and one of the most prolific American Hispanists, with over a hundred books between monographs and editions. His work spans Argentine literature, Mexican and Brazilian cinema, urban photography and Latin American Jewish studies.

The trilogy of urban perspectives on Buenos Aires (1998), Mexico City and São Paulo (2011) is his most direct contribution to urban studies. In it he defends something that seems obvious and is rarely practised: that you cannot understand a Latin American metropolis without reading what its inhabitants have written, filmed and photographed about it.