More than 70 percent of the people in the region live in settlements of at least 2000 people. Increasingly, one city, known as a primate city, is vastly larger than all the others, accounting for a large percentage of the country’s total population (Figure 3.21). Examples in the region are Mexico City (with 23 million people, a bit more than 21 percent of Mexico’s total population); Managua, Nicaragua (33 percent of that country’s population); Lima, Peru (29 percent); Santiago, Chile (34 percent); and Buenos Aires, Argentina (36 percent).

The concentration of people into just one or two large cities in a country leads to uneven spatial development and to government policies and social values that favor the largest urban areas. Wealth and power are concentrated in one place, while distant rural areas and even other towns and cities have difficulty competing for talent, investment, industries, and government services. Many provincial cities languish as their most educated youth leave for the primate city.

It always takes some resourcefulness to move from one place to another. Those people who already have some years of education and strong ambition are the ones who migrate to cities. The loss of these resourceful young adults in which the community has invested years of nurturing and education is referred to as brain drain. Brain drain happens at several scales in Middle and South America: through rural-to-urban migration from villages to regional towns and from towns and small cities to primate cities. There is also an international brain drain when migrants move to North America and Europe; for example, one in four U.S. doctors are foreign born. Migrants often want better access to jobs and education, and to help their families with money they send back home.

Urban Landscapes A lack of planning to accommodate the massive rush to the cities has created dense urban landscapes with often inadequate infrastructure. The arrangement of urban landscapes is also very different from the common U.S. pattern. In the United States, a poor, older inner city is usually surrounded by affluent suburbs, with clear and planned spatial separation of residences by income as well as separation of residential, industrial, and commercial areas. In Middle and South America, by contrast, both affluent and working-class areas have become unwilling neighbors to unplanned slums filled with poor migrants. Too destitute even to rent housing, these “squatters” occupy parks and small patches of land wherever they can be found, as depicted in the diagram in Figure 3.22.

Unplanned Neighborhoods The best known of these unplanned communities are Brazil’s favelas (Figure 3.23). In other countries they are known as slums, shantytowns, colonias, barrios, or barriadas. The settlements often spring up overnight on vacant land after a coordinated collective occupation by poor homeless families. They rarely occur with the landowner’s permission, and are without city-supplied water, electricity, or sewer service. Housing is hastily constructed with whatever materials are available. Once the settlements are established, efforts to eject squatters usually fail, though police are often called in to attempt to evict them (see Figure 3.21C). The impoverished are such a huge portion of the urban population that even those in positions of power will not challenge them directly. Nearby wealthy neighborhoods simply barricade themselves with walls and security guards.

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The squatters are frequently enterprising people who work hard to improve their communities. They often organize to press governments for social services. Some cities, such as Fortaleza in northeastern Brazil, even contribute building materials so that favela residents can build more permanent structures with basic indoor plumbing. Over time, as shacks and lean-tos are transformed through self-help initiatives into crude but livable suburbs, the economy of favelas can become quite vibrant, with much activity in the informal sector. Housing may be intermingled with shops, factories, warehouses, and other commercial enterprises. Favelas and their counterparts can become centers of pride and support for their residents, where community work, folk belief systems, crafts, and music (for example, Favela Funk) flourish. Many of the best steel bands of Port of Spain, Trinidad, have their homes in the city’s shantytowns.

Planned Elite Landscapes In contrast to colorful but problematic favelas are districts in nearly every city that are modern, planned, and similar to elite urban districts across the world. Examples of such urban landscapes can be found in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and other cities in Brazil’s southeastern industrial heartland. These cities have districts that are elegant and futuristic showplaces, resplendent with the very latest technology and graced with buildings and high-end shops that rival those in New York, Singapore, and even Tokyo. Known as urban growth poles, these areas attract investment, trade, educated immigrants, and overall economic development—all of which make them stand out from surrounding landscapes.

Planners throughout the region now acknowledge, however, that in the rush to develop modern urban landscapes, municipal governments and developers neglected to underwrite the parallel development of a sufficient urban infrastructure (for an exception, see the discussion of the southern city of Curitiba below).

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In short supply are sanitation and water systems, an up-to-date electrical grid, transportation facilities, schools, adequate housing, and medical facilities—all necessary to sustain modern business, industry, and a socially healthy urban population. In recent decades, there have been massive investments in these systems, especially in the larger and wealthier countries, such as Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, that can afford the improvements. These investments are done in recognition that planned development of human capital through education, health services, and community development, whether privately or publicly funded, is a primary part of building strong urban economies.

Urban Transport Issues Transportation in large, rapidly expanding, partially unplanned urban areas with millions of poor migrants can be a special challenge. Favelas are often on the urban fringes, far from available low-skill jobs and ill-served by roads and public transport (see Figure 3.22). Workers must make lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive commutes to jobs that pay very little. The entire urban population gets caught up in endless traffic jams that cripple the economy and pollute the environment.

Yet the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba has carefully oriented its expansion around a master plan (dating from 1968) that includes an integrated transportation system funded by a public-private collaboration. Eleven hundred minibuses making 12,000 trips a day bring 1.3 million passengers from often remote neighborhoods to terminals, where they meet express buses to all parts of the city. The large pedestrian-only inner-city area is a boon for merchants because minibus commuters spend time shopping rather than looking for parking. Being able to get to work quickly and cheaply has helped the poor find and keep jobs. The reduced use of cars means that emissions and congestion are lowered and urban living is more pleasant.

Transportation in large, rapidly expanding, partially unplanned urban areas with millions of poor migrants can be a special challenge.

Gender and Urbanization Interestingly, rural women are just as likely as rural men to migrate to the city. This is especially true when employment is available in foreign-owned factories that produce goods for export. Companies prefer women for such jobs because they are a low-cost and usually passive labor force. Factors that push people out of rural areas can affect women disproportionately. For example, the shift toward green revolution agriculture has had a particularly hard impact on rural women because they are rarely considered for such jobs as farm-equipment operators or mechanics. In urban areas, unskilled migrant women usually find work as street vendors or domestic servants.

Male urban migrants tend to depend on short-term, low-skill day work in construction, maintenance, small-scale manufacturing, and petty commerce. Many work in the informal economy as street vendors, errand runners, car washers, and trash recyclers, and some turn to crime. In an urban context, both men and women feel sorely the loss of family ties and village life; the chances for recreating the family life they once knew are extremely low.

Once relocated to a city, migrant families may disintegrate because of extreme poverty and malnutrition, long commutes for both working parents, and poor quality of day care for children. At too young an age, children are left alone or sent into the streets to scavenge for food or to earn money for the family as street vendors (see Figure 3.21B).

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