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LATIN AMERICA
source: www.unhabitat.org/istanbul
+5/eclac.pdf
www.unchs.org/mediacentre/
documents/backgrounder5.doc
www.hicwas.kabissa.org/
trybody.html
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Latin America’s urbanisation phenomenon is not recent, but still very significant: almost 3/4 of the population currently live in urban areas…- Latin America and the Caribbean were 50% urbanised by 1960. Over the last 40 years, the region has experienced such a rapid rate of urbanisation that today 75% of the population lives in urban areas. Over the next 30 years the region is projected to gain only another 217 million urban residents;
- unequal distribution of land - mainly a legacy of colonialism but also due to commercialisation of agriculture - has pushed many rural residents into urban areas. Venezuela, for instance, has an urban population of 93%, the highest level of urbanisation in the world;
- the high urbanisation has in most cities resulted in rapid growth of slums and squatter settlements because governments cannot cope with the population increase in terms of provision of serviced building plots. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 128 million people are living in slums;
- available data indicate that the percentage of urban residents living in informal arrangements varies between 59% in Bogota, 50% in Caracas and Quito, and 40% in Mexico City and Lima. Illegal developments in the periphery of urban areas are making, for example, approximately 65% of the real city in São Paulo (Brazil) as illegal;
- of Brazil's 155 million people, 115 million live in cities. The country has 22 towns and cities with more than 500,000 people, most of which are located in the south and south-east of the country: some 15.2 million people live in the urban area around and including the city of São Paulo. For Rio de Janeiro, the figure is 9.6 million;
- in 1995 there were nearly 3,500 favelas in Brazil; 2/3 of them were in and around Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The favelas in Rio and outskirts contained 235,000 homes; around São Paulo the figure was 207,000;
- the city of São Paulo has over 11 million people. If all the outlying suburbs and favelas are included (in other words, the whole metropolitan area), the figure reaches over 15 million. São Paulo is now Brazil's biggest city - and one of the world's biggest;
- by some measures, population growth appears to have slowed in megacities in recent decades. The UN estimates that average annual growth rates plummeted in Mexico City between the 1960s and the 1980s - from 5.1% to 0.9% and in São Paulo from 5.4% to 1.9%; (1)
- in Latin America, where primary cities long monopolised growth, secondary cities like Tijuana, Curitiba, Temuco, Salvador and Belém are now booming, with the fastest growth of all occurring in cities with between 100,000 and 500,000 inhabitants; (2)
- a frequently cited example of urban managerial success is Curitiba, in Brazil, which through innovations to encourage use of buses rather than cars, land use regulations that conserve green space, and other measures, has avoided the degradation experienced in most other cities of comparable size in less developed countries;
- however, in Latin America and the Caribbean 48 % of cities have areas considered as inaccessible or dangerous to the police. (3)
(1) Martin P. Brockerhoff, “An Urbanizing World”, Population Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 3, September 2000 [ www.prb.org]
(2) Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, March-April 2004 [ www.doublestandards.org/davis2.html]
(3) [ www.unchs.org/mediacentre/documents/backgrounder6.doc]
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