By the dawn of the 21st century, more than half of the world's population was living in urban areas. This volume explores the implications of this unprecedented expansion in the world's most urbanized region, Latin America, exploring the new urban reality, and the consequences for both Latin America and the rest of the developing world.
About half of the region's poor live in cities, and policy makers across Latin America are increasingly interested in policy advice on how to design programmes and policies to tackle poverty. This publication argues that the causes of poverty, the nature of deprivation, and the policy levers to fight poverty are, to a large extent, site specific. It therefore focuses on strategies to assist the urban poor in making the most of the opportunities offered by cities, such as larger labour markets and better services, while helping them cope with the negative aspects, such as higher housing costs, pollution, risk of crime and less social capital.
During the last decade, the South American continent has seen a strong push for transnational integration, initiated by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who (with the endorsement of eleven other nations) spearheaded the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a comprehensive energy, transport, and communications network. The most aggressive transcontinental integration project ever planned for South America, the initiative systematically deploys ten east-west infrastructural corridors, enhancing economic development but raising important questions about the polarizing effect of pitting regional needs against the colossal processes of resource extraction. Providing much-needed historical contextualization to IIRSA’s agenda, Beyond the City ties together a series of spatial models and offers a survey of regional strategies in five case studies of often overlooked sites built outside the traditional South American urban constructs. Implementing the term “resource extraction urbanism,” the architect and urbanist Felipe Correa takes us from Brazil’s nineteenth-century regional capital city of Belo Horizonte to the experimental, circular, “temporary” city of Vila Piloto in Três Lagoas. In Chile, he surveys the mining town of María Elena. In Venezuela, he explores petrochemical encampments at Judibana and El Tablazo, as well as new industrial frontiers at Ciudad Guayana. The result is both a cautionary tale, bringing to light a history of societies that were “inscribed” and administered, and a perceptive examination of the agency of architecture and urban planning in shaping South American lives.
Originally published in 1985, Industrialization and Urbanization in Latin America focuses on the process of industrialisation in Latin America. The book links together the distinctive process of industrialisation to wider issues of urban and regional development in Latin America. The book looks in detail at the process of industrialisation in Latin America and the spatial ramifications in Latin American industrialisation; it argues that industrial growth and its geographical distribution is a principal cause of increasing disparities in income between regions within Latin American countries. This book will appeal to academics working in the field of urbanization and geography.
Various kinds of informal and extra-legal settlements—commonly called shantytowns, favelas, or barrios—are the prevailing type of urban land use in much of the developing world. United Nations estimates suggest that there are close to 900 million people living in squatter communities worldwide, with the number expected to increase in the coming decades. Informal Urbanization in Latin America investigates prevailing strategies for addressing informal settlements, which started to shift away from large-scale slum clearance to on-site upgrading in Latin America over the last 40 years, by improving public spaces, infrastructure and facilities. The cases in this book range from one micro intervention (the Villa Tranquila Project in Buenos Aires) to three large-scale government-run projects: the celebrated Favela Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro, the social housing program in São Paulo and the famous Proyectos Urbanos Integrales Approach in Medellín. The cases show a collaborative and sensitive transformation of landscape and public space, and provide designers and planners with the tools to develop better strategies that can mitigate the volatility that the residents of non-formal neighborhoods are exposed to. The book is a must-read for all who are interested or working in the global urbanization as well as social equity.
In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America’s twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken. Latin America’s twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book – Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela – but with references to others. He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why ‘take-off’ was not followed by the ‘drive to maturity’ in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America’s stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called ‘lost decade’ of 1980s. He shows how Latin America’s fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century – especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.
"With 80% of its population living in cities, Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized region on the planet. Located here are some of the largest and bes-known cities, like Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogota, Lima and Santiago. The region also boasts hundreds of smaller cities that stand out because of their dynamism and creativity. This edition of State of Latin American and Caribbean cities presents teh current situation of the region's urban world, including the demographic, economic, social, environmental, urban and institutional conditions in which cities are developing." -- p.4 of cover.
In the great cities of Latin America and Asia, international business and local firms meet and, in particular, influence teh development strategies of Third World countries. The authors of Theatres of Accumulation argue that these cities play a crucial role in the process of capital accumulation and of unequal exchange and dependency. They examine the twin patterns of convergence and divergence in lifestyles and economic activities, and show how the flow of capital through the urban system beings net losses to the rural regions and further exacerbates income inequalities between regions and classes. Theatres of accumulation provides an overview of urbanization in the Third World, as well as specific case studies. It deals with theoretical issues and projects the likely developments in urbanization in the future. Armstrong and McGee's work is essential reading for social science and planning professionals and students, in the developed world and the Third World, who are concerned with urban processes. This book was first published in 1985.
In this first comprehensive work in English to describe the building of Latin America's capital cities in the postcolonial period, Arturo Almandoz and his contributors demonstrate how Europe and France in particular shaped their culture, architecture and planning until the United States began to play a part in the 1930s. The book provides a new perspective on international planning.
