Population, territory and sustainable development

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Another issue at the top of the urban public agenda, albeit one that manifests differently in each
area, is socioeconomic residential segregation. ECLAC has addressed this issue in various publications,
applying different lenses and perspectives, and has thus echoed the increasing importance given to this
item on public agendas and in scholarly research and debate 14 (Pérez-Campuzano 2011; IDB, 2011;
Roberts and Wilson, 2009; Rodríguez, 2009; Dureau and others, 2002). In the paper presented by
ECLAC at its Thirty-third Session, held in Brasilia (Brazil), the Commission offered some guidance to
facilitate greater understanding of this phenomenon and promote the adoption of measures to address it
(ECLAC, 2010a).
The first contribution was a series of definitions. Specifically, it described the important
distinction to be made between socioeconomic residential segregation and metropolitan poverty, with the
former referring to the location of poor and rich, specifically homogeneous grouping along income lines
and the absence or scarcity of socially blended spaces. In fact, metropolises with similar levels of poverty
can have very different levels of segregation.
The paper’s second contribution has to do with the specific characteristics of Latin American
residential segregation and emerging trends. Regarding the former, the distinguishing marks of urban
segregation in Latin America have been the concentration of poverty on the urban periphery and the
location of high-income groups in clearly delineated, exclusive areas that tend to be connected by roads,
infrastructure or mass transit, depending on the city, to the historic central business district. This
notwithstanding, the socioeconomic diversification trend on the urban periphery and, in particular, the
out-migration trend among high-income families to the periphery have given rise to new views regarding
the form and intensity of current socioeconomic residential segregation (Rodríguez, 2009; Roberts and
Wilson, 2009). The debate currently surrounding these issues can only be resolved with empirical
evidence which, as explained later, is not easy to obtain. However, regardless of any future conclusions,
the lack of social diversity in areas of concentration of high-income groups does seem to be a stable or
worsening trend. 15 The main barrier to entry to those areas is the cost of land, but there are other factors
too, both formal and informal, which impede access.
The third contribution offered by the ECLAC paper is related to identification of the causes
underlying the urgency of this situation and the visibility that it has acquired. Contrary to what one
would think, the main cause is not the quantitative trend of these phenomena, even though this
argument is often made when claiming “a sustained increase in socioeconomic residential
segregation.” In reality, assessing the shape and magnitude of segregation, especially in terms of
scale, is a complex task that requires processing relatively sophisticated census data for each city.
This has not been done systematically in the region, and the few comparative studies that exist
(Rodríguez, 2009; Roberts and Wilson, 2009) are insufficient to prove that there is a clear, prevailing
trend in segregation levels. Furthermore, some of the participants in the current debate insist that
there has been a reduction in the scale of segregation (Sabatini, Cáceres and Cerda, 2001). What
nobody would dispute is the growing visibility of the situation in urban and metropolitan areas,
which is simply the product of the rising number of people living in cities and metropolises. But the
phenomenon that elicits the most concern these days are the effects of segregation, which some
authors have described as a “spreading malignancy” (Sabatini, Cáceres and Cerda, 2001). ECLAC
does not characterize it thusly but it has drawn attention to the mechanisms that have made
segregation a key factor in the process by which intrametropolitan territorial inequalities exacerbate
14
15
See ECLAC (2007), (2002) and (2000), and ECLAC/UN-Habitat (2001).
The sole exception to this rule are a handful of cities in which precarious settlements have managed to survive
for decades in wealthy areas despite the pressures placed on them, including the “urban surgeries” of the 1980s.