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Trends and Patterns of Latin American Urbanization, 1750–1920
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
This paper finds its point of departure in population figures for 8 Latin American countries and 61 cities during the period 1750 to 1920 (Tables 2–9, pp. 435–43). This span is a convenient one for the study of Latin American urban development. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, population statistics, at least those available from printed sources, become sparse and unreliable, and one begins to get totals of householders rather than head counts. Moreover, the wide swings in current estimates of regional populations for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make relative urbanization rates problematical even when one has good data for towns. For the time being, the functional scale for urban places proposed by Hardoy and Aranovich (1969; 1970) seems a more appropriate index for the Hapsburg and early Bourbon periods than a purely quantitative one. After 1920, when more frequent and modern national censuses facilitate data collection, a new era in Latin American urban development commences, marked by economic nationalism, broadened political participation, centralized economic planning, import substitution, the politicoeconomic ascendancy of the United States, and massive internal migrations.
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- Urban Systems
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1974
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