Urban Latin America

Many discussions about urbanization in Latin America start with statistics showing how dramatically the region has changed from rural to urban, often accompanied by moral outrage denouncing the terrible living conditions and uncontrolled crime in giant "megacities" that are said to be "out of control." These discussions can lead to dire predictions of a catastrophic urban future or, alternatively, hope that by urbanizing Latin America will sooner or later con- verge with North America in a future of prosperity once there is order and economic progress. Both predictions force us to ignore the fact that miserable housing and living conditions and uncontrolled violence prevail in cities of all sizes and rural areas as well, that for decades the fastest-growing cities in just about every region of the world have been small and medium-sized, and that signs of a convergence between North and South are mostly limited to the exclusive elite districts that have been there, reproducing themselves, since the colonial period. Both of these predictions--the pessimistic and the optimistic--fail to recognize the structural inequalities between urban and rural areas, within individual nations, and within and among metropolitan regions, to say nothing of the gaping inequalities between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. These urban myths add up to the urban fallacy--the notion that the problem is with the city itself and not with the social relations that govern society. More significant, they tell us very little about the most important things in this historic transformation from rural to urban: the economic, social, and political implications of this change. What does urbanization mean for the everyday lives of people? If all of Latin America is urban, then how can we even talk about urban phenomena and issues as different from all the larger issues? In other words, Latin America is now urban--but so what?