Urbanization and megacities

Major cities in Latin America and the Caribbean have undergone profound changes since the end of the past century. From the postwar period to the 1980s, the largest metropolitan agglomerations in the region led the economic expansion of their respective countries, expanding and enhancing their productive capacities. These metropolitan areas achieved significant social, economic, political and urban progress, concentrating large educational and health facilities, and becoming the main destination for internal migration flows. Latin America became one of the most urbanized regions in the world, second only to North America. By 2020 this subcontinent was home to six megacities with more than ten million residents each: São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá and Lima.

Urban and metropolitan development in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced structural problems linked to their relative capacity for labour absorption, social housing availability, urban growth management and planning, challenges for the metropolitan government and administration, and issues with advancing sustainable urban development. Likewise, the financial, technical and institutional capacities for managing large cities and metropolitan areas have been insufficient to cope with their explosive growth, driven by the migration of citizens often expelled from their places of origin and with limited training or few opportunities to deal with the challenges of their new habitat. Urban management has failed to ensure that the city expands on the most appropriate land or overcomes its structural limitations in terms of housing, infrastructure, facilities and services.

These changes have been described from various perspectives in the specialized literature (Aguilar & Escamilla 1999; De Mattos 2010; Duhau & Giglia 2016; Rodríguez 2019; Ward 2004). The main ones include: (1) concentrated decentralization; (2) large-scale suburban expansion coupled with spatial diffusion and fragmentation processes; (3) social diversification and increasing inequalities on the periphery; (4) housing renovation through the recovery of residential areas and therefore migratory attraction from central areas, sometimes in conjunction with gentrification or similar phenomena; (5) changes in the type and intensity of segregation, and (6) increased daily mobility.