Introduction: Extending the Global Change Agenda

 
    Change has long been a constant feature of our world, yet contemporary change seems distinctive in its pace and geographic scope. Current change is characterized by a rapid reordering of time and space, facilitated by the integration of financial systems, the internationalization of production and consumption, and the spread of global communication networks. In the past, changes were arguably more spatially bounded and limited in scope, and people and places had more time to adjust. Today, changes include the free flow of capital, the growth of multinational corporations, international labor migration flows, and the emergence of a global mass culture. We use the term globalization to refer to global changes of this kind. In particular, we focus on the impacts of globalization on urban processes in Latin America. We examine the causes and effects of rapid urban change in Latin America, specifically addressing the macroforces producing change in the countryside that impel people to move to cities, and how and why certain groups experience the urbanization process differently.

    We approach this topic through a political-economic perspective. This approach emphasizes how political and economic structures shape opportunities and constraints for different groups of people. Knox (1994) defines this approach as one that operates at the scale of macroeconomic, macro-social, and macro-political changes. The rapidly changing nature of cities, as they are incorporated into the capitalist search for cheaper labor, resources, and larger markets, reflects broader transformations occurring under globalization. But the political-economic perspective is not exclusively directed at a macro-scale (the supra-national and global); it also applies at a national and a city level. The political-economic perspective on globalization expands the concept of global change.

    The phrase global change has come to be associated with global environmental change, such as that resulting from changes in the earth’s climate-control mechanisms (e.g., global warming). The rapid pace of technological change has made us all the more aware of the interconnection of the world system and has helped foreground the global impacts of, for example, deforestation or industry’s contribution to the depletion of the earth’s protective ozone shield. Moreover, the activities and attitudes of humans in their race toward modernization has been thoroughly implicated in these changes, as demonstrated by the themes emerging from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

    It is interesting that much of the global change debate has been framed, both implicitly and explicitly, in terms of the physical and biological dimensions of our world. Although these issues are as important in urban areas as they are as in rural areas, more analytical attention has been devoted to areas of food production (agricultural regions) or of raw material extraction (forests, mineral deposits, etc.), and the investigation often stops with the "natural" environment. This point was not lost on Alfredo Gastal, Director of the United Nations Office of Environment and Human Settlement, when he said, "it was really ironic for those of us who went to the Rio Summit . . . . Everyone there was worrying about trees and rainforests, and they were in the city that best exemplifies the worst problem in Latin America, and nothing was said about it" (Nash 1992, 116). We agree that the degradation of cities and the forces producing those changes have been a neglected topic in the global change research agenda. Although urban and economic geographers have paid substantial attention to political-economic processes, these understandings have not been linked with research on the human dimensions of global change.

    Just as we are living through a period of pronounced alterations in the physical environment, we are also experiencing significant changes in the form and spatial organization of the built environment, especially cities. In this era of globalization, cities have become a symbol of the transformations of economies and societies, transformations that simultaneously alter the biological dimensions of our planet. Indeed, a closer examination of the built environments of cities would expand our understanding of the many different aspects of global change, highlighting not only the degradation of the earth’s natural surroundings, but also showing us the changing social and economic relations that are integral to our changing world. Geography is uniquely positioned to investigate these issues because it addresses the linkages between nature and society, as well as between global and local scales. Our geographic approach therefore helps us to investigate the far-reaching effects of globalization and the ways in which these effects play out in specific places and in the lives of the people who live there.

 
 

The Momentum is Swinging South

 
    When we consider that by 2025 over 5 billion of the earth’s estimated 8.3 billion inhabitants will live in urban areas (WRI 1996), it is clear that to ignore urban environments is foolish. But when exactly is a settlement considered a city or an urban place? Data on city size or percentage of urban population depend on how "city" or "urban" is defined, and those definitions can vary a great deal from country to country reflecting what is historically, culturally, and politically urban in that country. A city is generally defined as a political unit, a place organized and governed by an administrative body. The UN has standardized its data to recognize settlements of over 20,000 as "urban," those of more than 100,000 as "cities," and settlements of more than 5 million as "metropolises." (By contrast, the US Census defines an urbanized area as a settlement including a central city and surrounding areas with a combined population of more than 50,000 people.) In reality, however, population settlements often spill beyond city boundaries, especially as more and more people are moving to urban areas. For example, to what extent should the populations of spatially separate suburbs be included as part of an urban place? Moreover, standardized tabulations are often replaced with each country’s own estimates when international comparative statistics are compiled, such as those regularly assembled by the World Bank (Drakakis-Smith 1987, 2).

    The term urbanization refers to the transformation from rural/agrarian to urban/industrial and diversified activities. This transformation occurs by rural-to-urban migration and by a high rate of natural increase. Although we see high urban growth rates in less developed countries (LDCs), these do not necessarily reflect "urbanization" because growth rates in the countryside often remain higher than those in the cities. Only when urban growth rates are higher than rural growth rates do we see urbanization occurring. Likewise, it is inaccurate to conceive of urbanization as the result of only simple population movements and growth dynamics. The urbanization process refers to much more than simple population growth; it involves changes in the related economic, social, and political transformations, all of which we shall examine in this module. In more developed countries (MDCs), the average proportion of the population living in urban areas is nearly 75%, whereas it is 37% in LDCs (United Nations 1995).

    This relatively small urban percentage in LDCs masks two important facts, especially in relation to a discussion of the changing environmental and social impacts of urban growth. First, it is important to consider variations in LDCs. Many parts of Latin America are as urbanized as Europe; the proportion of the population that is urban is very high in Venezuela (93%) and Argentina (88%), for example (WRI 1996). Moreover, individual cities such as Sao Paulo and Mexico City are already among the largest in the world (see Table 1).

    Second, in LDC’s the sheer size of urban populations and rates of urban growth are greater than those in more developed regions of the world. The absolute total number of people represented by the 37% figure for the LDCs far exceeds the urban population of the MDCs. Of the world’s total urban population, 66% (1.7 billion) live in LDCs, while only 34% (868 million) live in MDCs (United Nations 1995, 25). The larger number of people living in LDC regions affects the rate of growth of urban areas there. For instance, in 1930, Latin America had just over 100 million inhabitants; 60 years later, its population had passed the 425 million mark. To put this into a historic perspective, the urban growth of Europe (including Russia) throughout the whole of the nineteenth century amounted to some 45 million people, a total exceeded by Brazil in just 25 years (1950-1975). As another example, it took London 100 years to expand from 1 million in 1860 to 9 million in 1960. By contrast, Mexico City’s population was 1 million just 50 years ago, and is over 15 million today (Hift 1990). Thus, while urbanization in MDCs is high, the impact of growth rates and initial population sizes in LDCs substantially affects environmental, economic, and social aspects of global change.
 

City Living: At What Cost, For Whom?

 
    The impacts of global change in urban areas will be different in different regions, and people’s ability to adjust to these changing conditions will vary as well. Latin American cities are characterized by an increase in the polarization between rich and poor; a minority of city dwellers reap the benefits of rapidly expanding markets in the global economy, and the majority live on the urban periphery in poverty and environmental degradation. Based on 1980 estimates, 6 million (or 40%) of Mexico City’s 15 million inhabitants live in what is generally termed informal settlements, as do about one-third of Sao Paulo’s total population (United Nations 1987). These kinds of settlements consist of housing that is built with materials like scrap wood, old tires, and corrugated sheets of tin. Likewise, such areas are often highly polluted owing to the lack of urban services, including running water and trash pickup, and they often lack electricity or paved roads.

    What role does this kind of urban poverty serve in a new world order where the production and consumption of goods is split geographically? Is it an inevitable and unfortunate situation that will be remedied as markets expand and city revenues increase? Or does such poverty serve a distinct function for the benefit of global capital? We believe that the latter better characterizes the role of poverty in the new world order. The concentration of investment in cities attracts large numbers of migrants looking for employment, thereby creating a large surplus labor force, which keeps wages low. In other words, when there are more people than jobs, people will work for any income that they can get in order to make a living, thereby allowing employers to pay the bare minimum in wages. This surplus of labor is highly attractive to American or European companies who can produce goods like textiles, cars, computer parts, or CD players for consumers in MDCs for far less than if the goods were produced where wages are higher (see Table 2). Moreover, the government of the "host" country (i.e., the LDC with low wages) also benefits in that attracting foreign companies to the country brings much needed investment and revenues.

    Although LDC governments get investments, foreign companies can produce more cheaply, and MDC consumers obtain lower-priced goods and maintain a high standard of living, workers on both sides of the "development divide" suffer from the new trends in global production. Workers in MDCs lose out as job opportunities are shifted to the South in search of less expensive labor; in LDCs, wages are often so low that workers are unable to make a living. In all, the complex relationship described here is one that Angotti (1995, 16) argues serves the interests of transnational corporations (TNCs) while poverty and the large number of people in urban areas help to maintain a ready-made labor reserve.
 

    Because of the marginal status women occupy in many societies, women are paid on average less than men. As a result, TNCs like to hire women, and men have found it harder and harder to find work in new production markets. We can see that gender is an important aspect of globalization and the new processes of production. On the one hand, women have facilitated globalization, becoming the majority of workers in many factories. On the other hand, as more and more women move to cities in Latin America (women now make up 57% of urban populations in this region) and are hired for slim earnings, they help maintain and even increase income polarization within cities. This further fuels the process of global economic change and, by driving down the wages in MDCs, forges a common bond between the urban poor in MDCs and the urban poor in LDCs.

    Such inequalities raise questions about the uneven power relations that often drive global transformations and govern the distribution of the benefits of such changes. This module is expressly concerned with the absence of social justice, or equity, in many forms of global change today, that is, how the process of urbanization in the South favors certain groups while constraining the opportunities of others. We emphasize the human dimensions of global change by focusing on the impacts of macroforces on different sub-populations defined by economic status, gender, and/or ethnicity. In this way we highlight some of the social inequalities that arise from the macroforces associated with global change.

 

Patterns and Processes of Urbanization in Latin America

 
    This module focuses on Latin America because it is considered the "most urbanized area in the less developed regions" of the world (United Nations 1995, 23). In 1970, 57% of Latin America’s population lived in urban areas; by 1994, this figure had increased to 74%. Forty-one cities in this region now have populations of more than one million, and the average size of a Latin American city is 3.6 million (Angotti 1995, 14). By 2025, 85% of the population of Latin America is expected to be urban (United Nations 1995, 23).

    Urbanization in Latin America has usually involved the biggest city in each country growing larger and faster than the other cities. This phenomenon results in urban primacy or the demographic, economic, social, and political dominance of one city over all others within an urban system. For example, the Lima metropolitan area has over 7.5 million inhabitants, one-third of Peru’s total population; the second largest city, Arequipa, has fewer than 700,000 inhabitants (Angotti 1995, 14). Cities like Lima that have the majority of a country’s population living in them are called primate cities.

    This form of urbanization was initially encouraged by the political and administrative centralization instituted by the Portuguese and Spanish during the colonial period and was accelerated after independence by the port locations of most of the capital cities. Centralized administration and a port location enabled governments to control the flows of most exports and imports and led to a single urban "gateway" for products being shipped into and out of the country. Because of this process, Latin America today contains some of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. As Table 1 illustrates, in 1995 five of the world’s 25 largest "megacities" were in Latin America.

    Urban primacy has not been the only form of urbanization occurring in Latin America in recent years. Smaller, "intermediary cities" have increased in size largely because of new levels of globalization and the increasingly specialized functions that cities are performing. Latin America now has 41 cities with more than one million inhabitants (14 in Brazil alone) and 11 cities with greater than three million inhabitants. This growth of intermediary cities of over 10,000 inhabitants or the "broadening of the urban hierarchy" (Roberts 1989, 8) has the effect of dampening the number of megacities projected for Latin America (see Table 3). Nonetheless, it is important to note that the smaller cities have not gained greater political power or improved government services despite their growth. These cities still tend to lack the economic diversity, urban services, and the cultural life that primate cities offer.
 

Conclusion

 
    A focus on cities encourages us to think about processes of global change beyond those associated with the biophysical environment. It helps direct our attention to the political and economic structures of power that drive processes of change and shape their effects. In addition, it highlights the lives of under-served and disadvantaged populations, who shoulder a disproportionate share of environmental damage and clean-up, both in the countryside and in the cities.

    The centrality of issues surrounding urbanization and city life within the global change agenda raises a number of questions. What forces are causing urban populations, especially in LDCs, to increase at such rates? Why are these forces important to include in our discussion of global change? What effects does this growth have on the structure of cities and the lives of their inhabitants?

    To answer these questions, we need to examine the forces behind the changing environments of urban areas to provide a way of understanding larger processes of global change. To understand rapid urban growth rates and the emergence of megacities in LDCs, we need to look at how these cities and LDC economies are linked to broader political-economic systems of international trade, finance, and production -- the internationalized capitalist system of the late twentieth century. This approach will allow us to see how the serious issues faced by LDCs such as poverty, unemployment, the debt crisis, and environmental challenges are linked directly to the explosion of urban growth.