Population, territory and sustainable development

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comparison. But the most convincing argument had to do with the territorial consequences of three
lengthy processes that began in the 1990s: the change in the development model (open markets and
liberalization); the expansion of the “postfordist” production model; and political and administrative
decentralization. The assumption was that liberalization would benefit regions that produced a large
volume of globally traded commodities and would rejuvenate rural life and economies (Daher, 1994, p.
64) inasmuch as productive restructuring would promote a spatial restructuring. Looking to the process of
metropolitan deconcentration in the developed countries, the conjecture was that decentralization would
strengthen local development and lead to a redistribution of resources and population.
However, the effects of these territorial processes have not been as clear or dramatic as expected.
Moreover, since the 1990s, there has been a certain resurgence in the appeal of metropolises, as supported
by new theoretical approaches, notably the “global cities” approach (De Mattos, 2001). The revitalization
of these cities is reflected in objective indicators, such as declining poverty, less pollution and expanded
coverage of basic services. This resurgence does not, however, mean a return to the era of large waves of
urban migration, although the attractiveness of these cities is observed to be on the rise among certain
groups (international immigrants, professionals, higher education students) and a complex configuration
of migrant and commuter links is growing denser, characterized by a network of adjacent cities
functionally integrated into a large city. These phenomena are addressed later in relation to “postindustrial
metropolitan mutations” (Rodríguez, 2011; De Mattos, 2010).
Given this situation, although most urban evolution models (Sobrino, 2011) and the data on
developed countries (Arroyo, 2001) indicate that deconcentration should be the prevailing trend, the
future of the pattern of concentration in the region’s large cities remains uncertain.
The causes of this pattern of concentrated urbanization in large cities are complex and have been
the subject of lengthy and inconclusive debate. While some authors focus on the historical roots of this
phenomenon, tracing the causal chain back to the colonial era and subsequently to the formation of
nation-states, others zero in on the development strategies implemented in the last century—particularly
the import-substitution industrialization and State-driven industrialization strategies—as the main cause.
Naturally, the latter tend to conclude that the adoption of a new development model, especially one in
which greater investment drives the growth of productive sectors located outside the large cities, can only
alter the relevance of large cities.
However, as seen in the primacy index, the available data point to considerable diversity in terms
of the evolution of the demographic and socioeconomic concentration of large cities. In some countries,
an intense process of deconcentration is under way in the capital city, with people moving to other cities,
many of which are becoming large cities, as noted in chapter IX (Rodríguez, 2011). In others, not only
has the level of concentration in the capital city not abated, it is rising. A special type of deconcentration,
which has been described in the specialized literature, occurs within a relatively small radius and consists
of the loss of the demographic and productive importance of a metropolis due to an increase in the
population and economic activities of a cluster of nearby cities. Rather than a deconcentration process,
what may be happening in these cases is an expansion in the scale and scope of the metropolis, or a
“concentrated deconcentration.” This type of phenomenon has been observed primarily in Brazil (Pinto da
Cunha and Rodríguez, 2009). In contrast, since 1980 Mexico’s capital city has been experiencing an
undeniable process of deconcentration, both in demographic and economic terms, owing to the
demographic and productive expansion of distant cities (Sobrino, 2011).