Los Seminarios Montevideo:	| english version
	espacios para la reflexión y la propuesta colectiva a través del proyecto
	Arq. Salvador Schelotto
	Los Seminarios Montevideo en una mirada retrospectiva	| english version
	Arq. Salvador Schelotto
	Inusual confluencia de aportaciones	| english version
	Arq. Mariano Arana
	Una reflexión desde el Comité Académico	| english version
	Arq. Hugo Gilmet
	Los seminarios Montevideo vistos por los invitados extranjeros	| english version

Unusual Confluence in Contributions
Mariano Arana, Arch.

Cities, like societies, may and should be understood and interpreted more appropriately as processes rather than as results, as always transient and changing consequences that may be improved through constant processes of transformation and mutation that receive the direct impact of a whole range of players, each with his/her own modalities and peculiarities.

Cities cannot be considered, interpreted and even less imagined as a crystallized result, as a finishing-line or as the final image we aim to, but, on the contrary, as a permanent point of departure and as a challenge to creative imagination.

We have often sustained that cities are simultaneously both permanence and change, and they are also memory and a proposal for transformation, at the same time.

In several occasions we have mentioned that cities are a result of a diverse and polyphonic conjunction, for which reason in no way should they be considered as the result of the performance of architects, engineers or mayors. Cities are created by their people across generations, overlapping an endless number of successive layers, generating complex, historical, diverse and even contradictory accumulations that gradually build up.

The various contributions, confrontations of opinions, criticisms, remarks and innovating proposals are more than welcome in such processes. The very dynamic of the events implies debates, induces criticism, it encourages confrontation of opinions and clarification of differences. It also guides us to seek agreements and to build consensus.

The spirit that led us to enthusiastically support the Montevideo Seminars has been to foster a head-on consideration of our cities core problems, summoning various experts representative of diverse cultural environments and different academic positions. The idea is to confront postures, to experiment alternatives, and to analyze and discuss the results.

After several years since its first edition in 1998, we have founded reasons to assure that their success is the natural consequence of that unusual confluence of various mixed contributions.

Let the event be welcome.

Arch. Mariano Arana.
Mayor of Montevideo