GEOG 3515

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GEOG 3515

• The Geography of South America

Class 23 Economic GeographyUrban Environments
Cityscapes and Shantytowns
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South American Cities

• In the USA and Canada, land use in cities is
  usually closely controlled by zoning, determining
  the relative locations and mixes of different
  developments.
• Such planning is relatively, speaking, absent
  from the South American city which had and has a
  much more laissez-faire approach to building.
  
• This does not mean that South American cities are
  just random and have no spatial pattern.
  
• The lack of planning has organically tended to
  produce a relatively recognizable juxtaposition
  of land use zones the provide stark contrasts
  between rich and poor.

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South American City Model
From Ford, 1996. New and Improved Model of Latin
American City Structure. Geographical Review
86(3), 43740.

• The generic urban model above highlights the
  growth of Latin American cities and the clear
  class divisions within them.
  
• While the central business district (CDB), elite
  spine, and residential sector may have excellent
  access to services and utilities, life in the
  zone of peripheral squatter settlements is much
  more difficult.
• In many Latin American cities, one-third of the
  population resides in squatter settlements.

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Inner City

• Before the development of the modern economy and
  rise of the service sector, the inner city was
  always an enclave of the elite, with large lots
  and big houses usually hidden away behind
  imposing walls with interior gardens or
  courtyards.
• With the development of the high rises and the
  growth in the size and scale of commerce, the
  inner-city has given way to a Central Business
  District, in many cases the elite taking
  advantage of their ownership of large core lots
  to cash in on the real estate market as land
  values appreciated.
• Elites have chosen to move to choice locations
  along a transit route, normally a multi-lane
  boulevard, connecting the CBD to one or more
  satellite mall-type developments on the edge of
  the old town center with entertainment, upscale
  shopping and franchise restaurants, frequently
  American like TGI Fridays or Tony Romas.

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Inner City Landmarks

• The Republic period may have coincided with a
  wave of nationalistic fervor and the construction
  of several large avenidas or boulevardes with
  large, grandiose buildings and monuments.
• Somewhere in the center of most South American
  cities will be one or more grand plaza mayores or
  main squares onto which will front ornate
  cathedrals, el teatro nacional and/or imposing
  government buildings, many dating back to the
  colonial era.
• The squares will be occupied by constantly
  milling peoples lottery ticket sellers,
  chess-players, etc. and will increasingly have
  become fringed by fast-food restaurants, either
  local franchises (e.g. Pollo Campero) or global
  (McDonalds, Pizza Hut, etc.) side streets will
  have small, family owned stores.
• Since the Spanish preferred river sites for their
  cities, many will have a sizeable water body
  passing through it with bridges criscrossing,
  gravel and sand miners digging, trucks and cars
  being washed in the river bed, and sewers
  draining freely in.

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Characteristic Inner Zones

• Also near to the center will be the Zona Viva
  an upscale area, perhaps of historical value with
  preserved buildings in good condition, and the
  focus of non-mall night life boutiques,
  restaurants, nightclubs and so forth.
• Most South American cities will also have a red
  light district with a less upscale character full
  of bars, pool halls and cheap hotels used for
  prostitution - these are frequently close to the
  market or to the industrial area and very seedy.
• Near the center is also usually a mercado a
  sprawling market complex of covered stalls
  vending a staggering array of items, usually very
  cheaply, and dotted with food vendors, frequently
  selling traditional dishes

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Linking the Edges

• Although the CBD portion of the core has been
  extensively redeveloped and is high-rise, much of
  the older center of South American cities,
  particularly those built in mountainous areas, is
  a tangle of narrow streets with walled compounds
  and store fronts hemming in foot and vehicle
  traffic between narrow, frequently non-existent
  side-walks.
• Growing car ownership and heavy use of diesel
  buses for public transport makes the roads
  frequently jammed, the air polluted and the noise
  levels intense.
• With the industrial areas outside the main core
  of the town, the elite tending toward the outer
  edges, and the malls sprouting up everywhere,
  many South American cities have bypassed the town
  center with a peripheral ring road (the anillo
  periférico) which enables elites to get to the
  various malls or around to the factory areas
  without navigating across the center of town.
• Frequently, the periférico marks the beginning of
  the shanty towns, the elite living inside the
  ring, the poor outside.

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Suburban Trends

• Unlike North American cities, the inner core of
  South American cities has, until recently,
  remained vital and of greater social standing,
  the periphery relegated to poverty, decay and
  crime.
• However, a more recent trend, not reflected yet
  in the Ford model, is for the center to be
  further forsaken by the elite in favor of
  satellite, gated-community type developments
  outside the periférico in areas not yet covered
  by shanty towns (what would be termed greenbelt
  areas here) in Brazil this is frequently
  beachfront areas further out along the coast.
• Frequently, they are built in line with existing
  elite spines with good roads extended out across
  the periférico through the shanty towns to permit
  the elite to transit through in their SUVs,
  Mercedes or BMWs to their jobs in the CBD.
• However, ironically, these roads tend to permit
  the development of spurs of shanty settlements on
  the greenfield hillside areas bisected by the
  improved roads.
• Sprawl, facilitated by buses, has extended the
  limits of cities.

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Inner City Trends

• Adjacent to the CBD, in areas that were formerly
  elite residential zones but which have not yet
  attracted the developers bulldozers, a flight of
  the rich to the spines and to the gated
  greenfield suburbs has left mansion homes vacant
  of their former owners.
• Frequently, these have been converted into rented
  tenements multi-family apartment buildings in
  which several whole dwellings will be carved out
  of a single room, resulting in twenty or even
  forty families living in a building once housing
  a single family and their servants.
• These then become the shanty-towns of the
  inner-urban poor, those working as street vendors
  or in low-paying service jobs in and around the
  towering commercial buildings of the next door
  CBD.
• These types of changes create zones of disamenity
  which are neglected by the city authorities and
  exploited by the landlords.

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Shanty Towns

• Every South American city has them usually on
  the edge of town outside the ring road, often on
  steep slopes or along river corridors subject to
  periodic flooding.
• So common are the shanty towns that almost every
  country in South America has its own term for
  them favelas, villas miserias, pueblos jóvenes,
  cerros and quebradas, and so forth.

• Depending on the country and city, shanties may
  contain more than half of the urban population,
  although 20-30 is a more common figure.
  
• In some situations, rapid growth of cities has
  led to shanties filling in underutilized space
  (for example steep unstable slopes) inside the
  sprawling metropolises, creating stark
  juxtapositions.

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Highly VariableZones

• They are characterized more by the fact that the
  land they occupy has no title the communities
  are squatting on (usually) public or ejidal lands
  than the nature of the dwellings.
• Depending on age, they can range from sprawling
  collections of hastily constructed shacks of
  scavenged materials to more orderly, multi-room
  brick or cement panel buildings, often with rebar
  or wood scaffolding sticking out of a flat roof -
  evidence of permanency, or at least ambitions of
  such.

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Changing Attitudes

• Population growth has overwhelmed most South
  American cities and shanty towns are obvious
  demonstrations of this.
  
• In the 1960s and 70s, when officials had not yet
  accepted the ultimate, even necessary reality of
  the shanty town, they were seen as failures and
  blights and were frequently eradicated with or
  without efforts to replace them with public
  housing complexes financed, all to frequently, by
  foreign loans.
• The elite viewed them with distain and fear,
  imagining them to be soul-less hovels devoid of
  virtues and without community.
  
• Frequently, we confuse economic poverty with
  poverty of spirit, absence of dignity and other
  redeeming social virtues and values.
  
• Frequently, the opposite is true and gradually
  the shanty town has been looked at in a more
  positive light in terms of its societal role and
  the lives of its inhabitants, although it is
  still of great concern from the perspective of
  securing material quality of life and access to
  the key services enjoyed by formal settlements.

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Characteristics of Shantytowns

• Population densities are high, families living in
  close proximity to each other on small parcels of
  land.
  
• Privacy is very limited, with minimal separation
  between households in both a geographical and
  physical sense.
  
• Basic services are usually absent especially
  garbage collection, sanitary sewer service,
  telephone and piped potable water supply,
  although basic electricity service might be
  provided (often with many illegal connections).
• Roads are usually unpaved, with no formal surface
  drainage to conduct surface runoff safely off the
  roads and down hillsides, leading to extensive
  erosion.
• Garbage is usually burned in oil drums or pits
  and open-air defecation is common, thus
  development projects frequently promote
  pit-latrine projects in shanty towns.

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Change Over Time

• In the beginning, amenities are limited with
  perhaps a local front-room store (pulperia)
  selling basic items in a particular vecino
  (neighborhood) and many street-vendors and
  hawkers will be present selling food items and/or
  anything that can be carried or pushed up the
  potholed and muddy streets.
• Depending on the age of the settlement, schools
  may be absent although as time goes by and the
  shanty upgrades to greater permanency and
  substance, such things as churches, schools,
  police stations, health clinics and public
  transport nodes will become established.
• Prior to this maturity, shanty dwellers will need
  to walk down to the bottom of the community and
  to the periférico to hop on a bus to work, the
  doctor, church or school.
• Development more permanent structures and better
  roads, depending on the terrain, might bring bus
  service and water tankersto the streets.
  
• In the cases where formal incorporation of the
  shanty town occurs and titles are provided, roads
  might by paved and water and sewer pipes laid
  along with telephone lines.

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Some Pros and Cons of Shantytowns

• Illegal squats that, over time, become
  established and provided with services by
  authorities gives the urban poor a stake in
  society that they could not otherwise get.
• They are a solution to a public housing issue
  that the formal economic system and government
  programs are ill-equipped to satisfy.
  
• As the poor luchar for a better life, they tend
  to upgrade their own environment through
  self-help, eventually raising the quality of the
  barrios to something approaching middle-class
  status.
• The reserve of urban poor close to the city
  provides a wealth of potential employees usually
  willing to work for low wages.
  
• Because they are unplanned, they do not conform
  to appropriate building or public-works standards
  and thus are likely to experience public safety
  problems.
• Because they lack basic services, they are foci
  for disease, both vector-born and infectious, and
  lead to water pollution from erosion and sewage
  runoff.
• Made of ramshackle materials in risky locations,
  they are especially subject to the impact of
  earthquakes, floods, landslides, etc.