SUPUESTOS DE INTERRUPCIÓN DEL MERCADO

Even if the statistical figures show a more or less continuous growth in most of the metropolises, a more precise view shows that their development has not been all the same (see Table 3.4). Different economic, political, demographic and sometimes environmental circumstances have accelerated or slowed down their growth during different periods. For this reason the hierarchy of metropolises has completely changed since the 1940s. The initial dominance of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro has been largely surpassed by Mexico City and São Paulo. Lima and Bogotá have both surpassed Santiago. Caracas is now much smaller than other Brazilian and Mexican secondary cities. Giant cities have decreased their growth: between 1970 and 1990, São Paulo growth rates were approximately cut by half, Rio de Janeiro by two thirds and Mexico City by three quarters (Tolosa, 1998). Across the region, migration rates have been very low and even negative in the cities of more than five million inhabitants during the 1990s (ECLAC, 2000).

Figure 3.7 illustrates graphically the spectacular growth of the metropolises since the mid 1950s. The reason for such growth was the massive arrival of millions of people looking for a better future in the city. These were partly expelled from their rural territories and partly attracted by the metropolises, where the import-substitution industrialisation period was in full swing. At the same time the figure shows the slow down of growth since the 1980s, the so-called lost decade for Latin America, characterised by a strong economic crisis. Since that period, the large cities are growing more by their own natural growth than by migration.

Population (in thousands) 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 Bogotá 647 1.682 2.892 4.122 4.851 6.400 Caracas 683 1.346 2.174 2.641 2.989 2.300 Lima 1.025 1.845 3.302 4.608 6.422 7.500 Santiago 1.509 2.133 2.871 3.937 4.676 6.100 São Paulo 2.333 4.005 7.866 12.183 15.183 18.000 Rio de Janeiro 2.885 4.392 6.685 8.619 9.600 10.700 Mexico City 3.145 5.173 8.900 13.811 15.047 18.100 Buenos Aires 4.622 6.739 8.314 9.723 10.886 12.000

Table 3.4. Latin America’s largest cities: evolution 1950-2000 (Own elaboration with data from Villa and Rodriguez, 1996; United Nations, 2002).

� ���� ����� ����� ����� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� ���� Thousand inhabitants Mexico City Caracas Santiago Sao Paulo Bogota Buenos Aires Lima Rio de Janeiro

Figure 3.7. The growth of the largest Latin American metropolises during the 20th _{century. (Own} elaboration with data from Villa and Rodriguez, 1996; United Nations, 2002).

With the urbanisation process now at mature stage in the region, most nations have been diversifying their urban systems since the 1980s. These equilibrating trends, more pronounced in the countries of advanced and mid-way urbanisation, mark a sharp contrast with the population concentration in primate cities, which was dominant in the previous stages. Figure 3.8 shows the changes in the distribution of the urban population in Latin America during the last 50 years, per decades. It shows the relative weight acquired by the cities between one and five million inhabitants since the 1980s, and the somewhat lesser weight of those with more than five million since the 1970s. This is expected to decrease even more in the coming years (Arriagada, 2000).

Figure 3.8. Distribution of urban population in Latin America by city size (Source: Arriagada, 2000).

Due to the size of their population and local economies, some observers point out that the Latin American cities of more than five million inhabitants have become global cities (ECLAC, 2000). However, this is a too simplistic vision. It is not the size of the population or the economy but the integration of the local economies into the global economy which counts for a city to become ‘global’. According to economic considerations, global cities are the ones that house head offices of multinational corporations and financial services firms, those which are linked to the circulation and production of capital flows. Some refer to them as the sites of ‘control functions’ of major multinational enterprises.

There are different views about the global character of Latin American metropolises. According to John Friedman, in the Latin American region, only São Paulo can be considered a world city, while Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Caracas are regarded as secondary world cities, with the same rank as Johannesburg, Hong Kong, Taipei, Manila, Bangkok and Seoul (Tolosa, 1998, citing Friedman, 1986).

3.3. Spatial structure of the Latin American metropolises

After describing the effects of the rapid urbanisation and urban concentration on the size and relative position of the Latin American metropolises, this section addresses the effects of these transformations on the internal spatial structure of the metropolises. Yujnovsky (1992) has remarked that this topic has attracted less attention than urbanisation-related issues in Latin America. There is an abundance of local studies referring to urban ‘marginality’, informal housing, self-construction and urban social movements in the Latin American cities, but local studies do not generally deal with the urban structure taken as a whole. Most of these studies have considered the city as the background, the container of social and economic processes and not as an object of study. This is partly explained because the point of departure of such studies mainly comes from disciplines as urban sociology and anthropology and in much lesser extent by spatially oriented disciplines as urban geography or urban planning.

Three main models have been formulated to represent the internal structure of the (industrial) city: the concentric model (Park and Burgess in 1929), residential sector model (Hoyt in 1939) and the multiple nuclei model (Harris and Ullman in 1945). Although these models are considered of declining relevance since the general dissatisfaction with the rational comprehensive model of planning, geographers have advanced models that would represent the typical Latin American

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 100% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80%

more than 10 million

lass than half million half to 1 million 1 to 5 million 5 to 10 million

city (Van Lindert and Verkoren, 1994; Bosdorff, 2002; Janoschka, 2002). They basically combine the concentric model of the classic colonial city with the sectoral axe-oriented developments of the North American type of cities. However, cities are not easily represented in models. This is particularly true for the Latin American city, due to the great diversity of situations in which they find themselves. Secondly, the Latin American cities have generally maintained a great deal of multifunctionality that has not represented in the proposed models (van Lindert and Verkoren, 1994). Furthermore, the elements of these models do not represent accurately the elements of the rapidly changing Latin American city.

The internal spatial structure of a city is defined by the set of activities that take place in the city, their spatial dimensions and distribution in geographic space, as well as the connections between them. Its development is linked to the allocation of the available land and the allocation of resources among the different activities and groups. This allocation process is determined by the type of economic organisation, the local and national policies and regulations and the thousands of individual and institutional decisions that have an effect on urban space in a certain city, obviously framed within the social and political ‘rules of the game’ of each society (Yujnovsky, 1975). As these processes are essentially dynamic, their study demands an approach that takes into account the different stages in their evolution, in which the influences of regional, national and global scale developments become relevant too.

Four characteristic phases of the internal spatial structure of the Latin American cities can be distinguished:

• The traditional compact city during the colonial and early republican times;

• complemented by the axe-oriented suburban expansions since the late XIX up to the mid- XX century;

• which extended itself further with the growth of spontaneous settlements since the mid 1950s; and

• the decentralisation and recent emergence of ‘islands of wealth’ and the fragmentation of urban space since the mid 1980s.