Population, territory and sustainable development

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Many of the programmes developed to address urban deficits incorporated new approaches
associated with an emerging paradigm that puts a premium on intervention and government regulation
combined with citizen participation, respect for individual rights and integral democratic city
governance. This stands in contrast to the old urban management model that not only had a less
interventionist and regulatory stance but was more technocratic, vertical and focused. That said, there
was no paradigm shift but a sometimes rather uneasy coexistence of two approaches. Programmes for
reducing the housing shortage are a good example. Their main component is still massive building in the
periphery. This is progress compared with some periods, like the 1980s, when there was little in the way
of building. But such projects usually have negative impacts in terms of city governance and livability
and in terms of labour insertion and access to cities for the poor population. What is new is the addition
of other lines of action, such as affordable housing in areas where the beneficiaries of these programmes
live, location and improvement of low-income neighbourhoods and reclamation of inner city or
pericentral areas for residential use. Something similar is taking place in the transport sector, where
chaos drove several cities in the region to deploy restructuring and regulation programmes. Most of them
involved transferring organization and supervision of the system to centralized authorities or entities and
operation to various actors. Some cities in the region embarked on projects for building subway systems
or expanding existing ones, thereby enhancing the role of the public sector and central control over the
transport system. While these initiatives are costly and their success is not guaranteed, there are
encouraging examples that clearly involve a fresh look at cities. Transport is strategic for functional,
liveable cities; experiments with near-complete liberalization soon backfired and sparked this return to
greater government control in the sector (see box XI.7).
The new reality in Latin America becomes clear when, instead of viewing the urban population as
an undifferentiated whole, the focus is turned to the portion of the population living in cities (localities
with 20,000 or more inhabitants). Doing so reveals systems of cities with many more hubs. The term
“system of cities” is used here in its most basic sense: a simple grouping of all cities or a group of cities
on the basis of a shared feature, such as population size. This definition differs from another, more
complex one referring to a network of functionally integrated cities that could not be systematically used
for the purposes of this report.
This diversity of localities is promising because it offers far more alternatives than before for
locating the population and social and economic actors. However, as will be seen below, increasing the
number and diversity of cities does not automatically yield a robust, efficient network of settlements
because many inequalities remain between these hubs.
Chapter IX of the report looks at nearly 2,000 cities (localities with 20,000 or more inhabitants) in
the region in a half dozen groups based on population size. Population growth rates vary widely; in some
cities the population is growing by more than 5%, and in others it is shrinking in absolute terms.
Nevertheless, slowing population growth is widespread and is ocurring in almost all the cities examined,
regardless of population size. It is therefore to be expected that most cities will see a sustained slowing of
population growth.