South America is highly urbanized, with over 80 percent living in cities. Central America and the Caribbean are slightly less urbanized at around 70 percent. However, development and human settlement are not spread evenly across the region. Several countries in Middle and South America have a primate city. Primate cities are the largest cities in a country, are more than twice as large as the next largest city, and represent national culture. For example, of Uruguay's 3.4 million people, over half live in its capital and primate city of Montevideo. Not all countries of the world have a primate city. Germany's largest city is Berlin, which is roughly twice as large as Hamburg and Munich and was once the country's primate city. In recent years, however, Munich has increasingly become Germany's cultural center.

The region is also home to several megacities. A megacity is a metropolitan area with over 10 million people. Mexico City, the capital and primate city of Mexico, has a population of 22 million people. São Paulo, Brazil, has 21.5 million. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, are also megacities. Megacities often face distinct challenges. With over 10 million people comes a significant need for affordable housing and employment. Megacities often have large populations of homeless people and, particularly in Middle and South America, sprawling slums. This immense population also needs a carefully managed infrastructure, everything from sanitation to transportation, and the developing countries of this region have historically had difficulty meeting the demand.

Despite the challenges faced by large urban populations, rural-to-urban migration continues in the region. As in many parts of the world, poor rural farmers migrate to the cities where industrial development is clustered in search of work.

In general, the cities of Middle and South America follow a similar model of urban development (see Figure 5.13). The central business district, or CBD, is in the city's center, often alongside a central market. While some colonial buildings were demolished following independence, cities in this region still typically have a large plaza area in the CBD. As industrialization occurred, additional industrial and commercial development extended along the spine, which might be a major boulevard. The spine is often connected to major retail areas or malls.

Model showing the various regions within a typical Latin American city

Figure 5.13 Model of the Latin American City (Figure by author, based on Ford 1996)


Surrounding the commercial area of the spine is the elite residential sector, which includes housing for the city's wealthiest residents, often in high-rise condominiums. Around the CBD is the zone of maturity, an area of middle-class housing. The zone of in situ accretion is a transitional area from the modest middle-class housing of the zone of maturity to the slums of the city's poorest residents.

The outermost ring in a typical Latin American city is the zone of peripheral squatter settlements. In this zone, residents do not own or pay rent and instead occupy otherwise unused land, known as "squatting." In some cases, residents in this zone earn money by participating in the informal sector, where goods and services are bought and sold without being taxed or monitored by the government. Disamenity sectors arise along highways, rail lines, or other small tracts of unoccupied land where the city's poor often live out in the open. Residents often build housing from whatever materials they can find, such as cardboard or tin. What is perhaps most striking about the Latin American city is that in some areas, the city's poorest residents live in an area adjacent to the wealthiest residents, magnifying the income inequality that is present in the region.

Globally, around one-third of people in developing countries live in slums, characterized by locations with substandard housing and infrastructure. Estimates vary regarding the total number of people who live in slums, but it is likely just below one billion people and continues to climb. In Brazil, these sprawling slums are known as favelas, and over 11 million people live in favelas. Rocinha, located in Rio de Janeiro, is Brazil's largest favela home to almost 70,000 people (see Figure 5.14). It has transitioned from a squatter area with temporary housing to more permanent structures with basic sanitation, electricity, and plumbing.

Top-down view of the main road winding through Rocinha Favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Figure 5.14 Rocinha Favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (© Chensiyuan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

In some cases, those who live in the slums of Middle and South America are not unemployed but simply cannot find affordable housing in the cities. Rural-to-urban migration here, as in other parts of the world, has outpaced housing construction. Even some lower and middle managers cannot find housing and thus live in the slums.

Source: Caitlin Finlayson, https://worldgeo.pressbooks.com/chapter/middle-and-south-america/#chapter-199-section-4
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

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