Class structure and spatial polarization: an assessment of recent urban trends in Latin America

"In this paper, we review those major trends characteristic of peripheral urbanization as they are reflected in the recent Latin American experience. Such trends include: urban primacy and the relative absence of secondary city systems, the character and dynamics of the informal sector, housing deficiencies and state housing policy, and the recent rise of popular organizations oriented toward self-sufficiency or militant demand-making. These trends are important because they represent the form in which continuity and change of peripheral class structures are reflected in space, both at the national and local levels....[The authors conclude that] the political economy of Latin American cities is one where the resolution to the plight of underdevelopment promised by accelerated capitalist industrialization has not materialized. Instead, the process has produced a more complex and more contradictory social fabric."