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Latin American Urbanization During the Years of the Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Alejandro Portes
Alejandro Portes*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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The purpose of this article is to review recent trends in the process of urbanization in major Latin American cities. Abundant literature on Third World urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s painted a fairly coherent picture of the process during these decades. That image, which has been generally accepted in both academic and policy circles, serves as the backdrop against which contemporary trends will be evaluated here. The population in Latin America was becoming rapidly urbanized, but the process has been frequently described as “distorted” in a number of ways by the common condition of underdevelopment in which these countries found themselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , 1989 , pp. 7 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

This paper summarizes results from a collaborative project conducted during 1987–88 with the support of a research grant from the Heinz Endowment. The other participants in the project were William Cartier and Gabriel Murillo of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Mario Lombardi and Danilo Veiga of the Centro de Informaciones y Estudios del Uruguay (CIESU) in Montevideo, and Dagmar Raczynski of the Corporación de Investigaciones Económicas (CIEPLAN) in Santiago de Chile. These authors prepared extensive reports on their respective cities, which form the basis of this paper. They were originally presented at the Seminar on Latin American Urbanization during the Crisis, held at Florida International University in Miami in January 1988. I acknowledge gratefully each of these colleagues' participation in the project and the hospitality offered by the FIU Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies for our joint effort. I also wish to acknowledge these colleagues' comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as those of Bryan R. Roberts, Stephen Bunker, A. Douglas Kincaid, Akihiro Koido, and Richard Tardanico. Their collective expertise saved me from making many grievous errors. Finally, thanks are due to the editor of LAR and to the anonymous referees for their extensive comments. All, however, are exempted from any responsibility for the contents.

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