Population, territory and sustainable development

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Chapter IX
THE SYSTEM OF CITIES: AN EXPANDING UNIVERSE
A. INTRODUCTION
The previous chapter examined urbanization as a generic population process. Indeed, the defining
indicator was the percentage of the population living in urban locations or regions.
The urban population does not live in a single, homogeneous space, however, but rather in a set
of nodes that, while sharing some attributes such as density, artificiality, economic secondarization and
tertiarization and individuation, vary significantly. These nodes are cities that, when grouped at the
national scale, form each country’s system of cities.
For many reasons (including lack of data and technical difficulties in information management,
gaps in theory and complications arising from the need for policy guidance on a wide range of situations),
analyses often leap from a general view of urbanization to specific studies of cities, typically large ones.
This leaves the vast majority of cities unstudied and out of the policy spotlight and may ignore key
aspects of the configuration of urban settlements.
The report seeks to avoid this oversight by devoting the current chapter to a detailed look at the
system of cities. Of necessity, this is a broad approach because it would be impossible and inappropriate
to examine individual cases here. Some specific situations are referenced by means of bibliography, boxes
or footnotes. The data are arranged using population size categories for the system of cities, and the focus
is on comparing their demographic and socioeconomic features and patterns.
Included in this study for the first time is the issue of migration between cities. As discussed in
the previous chapter, high urbanization rates throughout the region have made migration between cities
the prevalent trend. More research on this kind of migration is needed in order to address gaps in both
theory and data, particularly regarding the volume, direction, and composition of flows. Now that
historical barriers to capturing and quantifying these characteristics have been overcome, these
movements can be broken down and examined for the first time here.
B. LATIN AMERICA’S MUSHROOMING SYSTEM OF CITIES
Focusing on large cities (more than one million inhabitants) in Latin America has detracted from research
on the other nodes that make up the system of cities. A more integral approach to urbanization in the
region calls for closer study of small and medium-sized cities. In fact, this is one of the main conclusions
of a recent study on urban poverty in developing countries (Linn, 2010) and new work by ECLAC. 1
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The study puts forward that the pattern of urban growth is shifting towards small and medium-sized cities. In
spite of the dominance of megacities during the last decades of the 1990s, population growth has been
concentrated in large but not primacy cities, and the current trend in Latin America is towards a growing
importance of small and medium-sized cities. Almost 40% of the regions’ urban population lives in medium-