Abstract
This article argues for a more systemic engagement with Latin American cities, contending that it is necessary to reconsider their unity in order to nuance the ‘fractured cities’ perspective that has widely come to epitomize the contemporary urban moment in the region. It begins by offering an overview of regional urban development trends, before exploring how the underlying imaginary of the city has critically shifted over the past half century. Focusing in particular on the way that slums and shantytowns have been conceived, it traces how the predominant conception of the Latin American city moved from a notion of unity to a perception of fragmentation, highlighting how this had critically negative ramifications for urban development agendas, and concludes with a call for a renewed vision of Latin American urban life.
Cet article plaide pour un engagement plus systématique avec les villes d′Amérique Latine, en faisant valoir qu′il est nécessaire de nuancer les visions de « villes fracturées » qui sont actuellement largement prédominantes, et reconsidérer les contextes urbains du point de vue de leur unité. Il commence par offrir un aperçu des tendances régionales en matière de développement urbain, avant d′explorer la façon dont l′imaginaire sous-jacent de la ville a évolué au fil du dernier demi-siècle, en se focalisant particulièrement sur la manière dont le phénomène des bidonvilles a été conçu. Plus particulièrement, il retrace la façon dont la conception dominante de la ville latino-américaine est passé d′une notion d’unité à une perception de fragmentation, tout en soulignant que ceci a eu des conséquences critiques et négatives pour la notion du développement urbain dans la région. L’article conclut en conséquence avec un appel à une vision renouvelée de la vie urbaine latinoaméricaine.
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Notes
Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was with an estimated population of 300 000 very likely the largest city in the world around 1400 (Low, 1995, p. 756).
A partial exception is the joint Princeton-University of Texas at Austin research programme on ‘Latin American Urbanization at the end of the Twentieth Century’ that has (so far) produced a collection of six individual city case studies (Portes et al, 2005), as well as two articles that focus on the specific consequences respectively of neo-liberalism and political mobilization for Latin American urban contexts (Portes and Roberts, 2005; Roberts and Portes, 2006).
Government policies also led to the creation of new urban centres in previously marginal regions, either explicitly to stimulate regional economic development or else to serve as administrative capitals. Examples include Brasilia in Brazil (see Holston, 1989), as well as Ciudad Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico or Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela.
Colombia is a partial exception, and had a more balanced urban network, at least during the 1960s (see Valladares and Prates Coelho, 1995).
International migration, particularly to the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, has been an ever-growing phenomenon since the 1980s (see Castles and Miller, 2009). Remittances sent back by migrants often have a significant impact on urban land and housing markets, and returnee migrants significantly change local urban culture. In addition, although tangential to the remit of this article, it is interesting to note that the overwhelming majority of this migration is ultimately urban–urban migration, as most immigrants come from cities in Latin America, and end up in cities abroad. Similarly, another important but often overlooked urban migration is the historical movement of Jewish, Japanese, and Arabic (‘Lebanese’) populations to Latin American cities in, respectively, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela and Colombia, and which have significantly shaped the urban cultural and economic dynamics of a number of cities in these countries (see Klich and Lesser, 1998; Tsuda, 2001). Finally, there also exist long-standing migratory links between cities within the Latin American region, including, for example, Bolivians moving from Cochabamba to Buenos Aires in Argentina, which have had a significant impact on local labour markets in the latter (see Bastia, 2007).
An often overlooked but very much related and extremely significant urban development that has proliferated concurrently with gated communities and closed condominiums in Latin American cities are the numerous semi-private malls and other ‘mega-projects’ catering exclusively for the rich (see Jones and Moreno-Carranco, 2007).
Such urban developments are often linked to broader processes of globalization, although as Laurence Crot (2006) has pointed out, it is important to realize that the territorial impact of globalizing forces will inevitably be mediated by the city system. In particular, she shows how territorial transformations that have taken place in Buenos Aires over the past two decades cannot be simplistically related to – or blamed on – global pressures, but rather are the result of their specific articulation with local urban configurations, and in particular the local Buenos Aires planning process. The same is arguably true of the ‘disembedding’ of Managua, although the planning process here has clearly been much more exclusive than its Buenos Aires equivalent (see Rodgers, 2008).
An important strand of research on the urban politics of the poor focused on the racial and the cultural (Jones, 2006; Wade, 1997, p. 63).
It is interesting to note there has recently emerged a burgeoning literature that merges a concern with urban indigenous politics and violence (see Goldstein, 2004; Lazar, 2008; Risør, 2010).
For convenience's sake, we will use these terms interchangeably in this article, although we realize that they do not necessarily all refer to equivalent phenomena under all circumstances, and moreover that they are often highly charged labels (see Gilbert, 2007).
As Alejandro Portes and Laura Benton, 1984, p. 593) note, ‘between 1950 and 1980, the total Latin American economically active population grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, but the urban labour force increased at a rate of 4.1 percent per year’.
There had been some earlier interest in slum-dweller politics, of course, including in particular by left-leaning academics during the 1960s and 1970s. This, however, was not sustained, partly because, as Alejandro Portes (1972, p. 282) noted, while ‘few theories have been more widely held than that of slum radicalism[,] few have met with more consistent rejection from empirical research. Studies in almost every Latin American capital have found leftist extremism to be weak, or even nonexistent, in peripheral slums’.
A particularly fruitful avenue of investigation in this regard has been the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1995) and Edésio Fernandes and Ann Varley (1998) on the way that slum dwellers increasingly resort to the law in order to access resources and challenge their informal status, as well as the burgeoning literature around the ‘Right to the City’ in Latin America (for example, Fernandes, 2007).
An opposite but related debate that emerged from the late 1980s onwards concerned the possibility of developing alternative forms of democratic governance that linked grassroots social movements more meaningfully with the state, including in particular more participatory forms of politics that could include spatially and economically excluded shantytown dwellers >(Fung and Wright, 2003; Chavez and Goldfrank, 2004). The ubiquitous example of such democratic innovation was participatory budgeting, and more specifically its implementation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which was widely held up as an empirical example that ‘another world is possible’ (Abers, 2000; Baiocchi, 2005). Interest in such processes has, however, begun to wane as numerous instances of practice either failed to work or else failed to institutionalize over the long term, including the paradigmatic Porto Alegre case (see Koonings, 2009; Rodgers, 2010).
This perspective can be related to earlier debates about self-help housing during the late 1960s and early 1970s – see, for example, Mangin (1967), and especially Turner (1968, 1969).
See Roberts (2010) for an exemplification of all these trends in relation to low-income neighbourhoods in Guatemala City.
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Acknowledgements
A modified version of this article will constitute the introduction to a forthcoming volume on urbanization and development in Latin America to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan, and which is a product of a larger multi-disciplinary UNU-WIDER Project on “Development in an Urban World”. Thanks to Gareth A. Jones and Melanie Lombard for their very useful comments.
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Rodgers, D., Beall, J. & Kanbur, R. Latin American Urban Development into the Twenty-first Century: Towards a Renewed Perspective on the City. Eur J Dev Res 23, 550–568 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2011.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2011.18