Modernization, Urbanization and Development in Latin America, 1900s - 2000s

Arturo Almandoz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317606505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America's twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken.

Latin America's twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book – Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela – but with references to others.

He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why 'take-off' was not followed by the 'drive to maturity' in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America's stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called 'lost decade' of 1980s.

He shows how Latin America's fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century – especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.

Chapter 1

Introduction

A ‘fictitious’ appraisal of capital dominates this new moment that features ‘market’ and ‘globalization’ as guidelines. This is perhaps the contemporary nickname of the old colonial curse: to build the country and then to globalize it, as it was to civilize and modernize it in the past.

Antonio Carlos Robert Moraes, Território e história no Brasil (2004)

Industrialization and Urbanization, Modernization and Development

The Urban Scale

Partly as a result of my background as urbanist – and partly as a precaution against becoming entangled in a notion that has been addressed from so many perspectives – this chapter departs from the mid-twentieth-century conception, based on functionalist sociology, according to which modernization is closely linked to industrialization and urbanization. In one of the classic formulations of the theory, in the 1950s Gideon Sjoberg established that, after the ‘folk’ or popular stage, followed by the ‘feudal’ or urban, the ‘modern industrial city is associated with a third level of complexity in human organization, a level characterized by mass literacy, a fluid class system and, most importantly, the tremendous technological breakthrough to new sources of inanimate energy that produced and still sustains the industrial revolution’ (Sjoberg, 1973, p. 19).¹ On an urban scale, industrial modernity was characterized by an expansion of the clearly-defined and community-based structure of traditional cities, greater territorial mobility made possible by mechanical means of communication, along with a more fluent social mobility facilitated by functional specialization of production, mass education and far-reaching media.

Sjoberg’s characterization thus coincided, to a large extent, with previous approaches to social change and modernization in the industrial era – from Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesselschaft antinomy to the Chicago School’s analysis of the spatial, functional and cultural segregation of the industrial metropolis.² Going beyond the urban domain, and into the 1950s and 1960s, the connection between industrialization, urbanization and modernization was also assumed, following an almost causal derivation, by Kingsley Davis and Leonard Reissman (1921–1975). Their approaches were from the standpoints of patterns associated with demographic transition and way of life, respectively, and relied on the examples of the North Atlantic countries that had industrialized in the nineteenth century (Davis, 1973; Reissman, 1964). The direct relationship between the three processes was maintained by countless others whose writings proliferated in different contexts and disciplines, following a reasoning that has been summarized by Savage and Warde in the following terms:

Modernisation theory maintained that places became more alike as industrialisation and urbanisation developed. Ways of life, culture and politics would become more homogeneous with a more developed division of labour, centralisation of state functions and the growth of the mass media. As a consequence, political cleavages typical of early modern and pre-industrial societies, those based on religion, region, clan or ethnic group, would subside and industrial divisions, essentially of class, would replace them. (Savage and Warde, 1993, p. 175)

Apart from the demographic transition identified by Davis – according to which industrial countries tended to stabilize their urbanization at 75–80 per cent, following an S-shaped curve developed over more than a century – the direct relationship of urbanization with modernization, and later with development, came through an assumption more or less explicit in different approaches, namely that ‘urban areas and the transport corridors between them are the focus of dynamic change’. As it has been pointed out by Potter and Lloyd-Evans, here lies another key for conceiving modernization, and eventually development, as a ‘temporal-spatial process’ by which modernity – assumed as a stage and not a process – is spread throughout space and territory. The way this modernity or development is diffused has been subject to different interpretations, but most of them coincide around the ‘top-down paradigm’ according to which major cities are the engines of that dissemination within a national territory and society (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998, pp. 37–38).

From National to International Challenges

The approach of Walt Whitman Rostow in The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-communist Manifesto (1960) – to be discussed later (see Chapter 5) – was perhaps the best known formulation, on a national scale, of that process of industry-driven and city-based modernization. In Rostow’s work the capitalist system is also assumed to be the expression of modernity or, more precisely, of the economic development that was the dominant paradigm after World War II, when the theory of modernization achieved its greatest influence (Weiner, 1966), including in Latin America, as we shall see. But not everybody was so elated with the prospect: in the midst of the developmental euphoria of post-war decades, the cautious view of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal maintained that ‘capitalist development is inevitably marked by deepening regional and personal income and welfare inequalities’, which produced ‘backwash effects’ on the distribution of benefits supposedly spread by capitalist modernization (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998, p. 38; see also Myrdal, 1957).

Part of Myrdal’s pessimistic interpretation was applicable to Latin America in spite of the subcontinent’s progressive image during the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, favoured by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Good Neighbour’ policy towards the region in the early 1940s, and especially after World War II, most of Latin America became the experimental land of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) and economic desarrollismo, boosted by political nationalism and artistic modernismos (see Chapter 4). Regarded as promising examples of developing countries – a category that seemed to have great resonance until the 1960s – most of Latin America’s industrializing societies were supposed to be exponents of the theory of modernization, as it was explained by developmental economics and functionalist sociology. This was at the same time as the agenda of social and historical studies about Latin America’s urbanization and cities was shaped with the sponsorship of the United States. It comprised a literature imbued with those theories of industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development, from Gino Germani (1969) to Philip Hauser (1967), among others. This literature seemed to show that Latin America’s developing nations were on the route to urbanization and industrialization, but at the same time warned that they were actually suffering from profound distortions when compared with the successful experiences of modernization in Europe, North America and other parts of the world. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the failure of capitalist-inspired modernity as a paradigm would give way to Marxist-oriented studies of urbanization and underdevelopment that put aside ideas of modernization and focused instead on reviewing the centre-periphery antinomy and dependence as key factors to explain Latin America’s sluggish inclusion within international circuits (Palma, 1978; Almandoz, 2008a, pp. 163–168). As the founder of Latin America’s very influential Theory of Dependence, in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967) André Gunder Frank arrived at a thesis that could be said to be the opposite to Rostow’s: developed countries became so at the expense of other nations’ underdevelopment (Frank, 1967, 1982).

Third World Urbanization and Globalization

Although it was not sufficiently stressed at the time by Manuel Castells, Aníbal Quijano and other analysts of the so-called ‘dependent urbanization’ in the region, much of the hindrance to Latin America’s path towards development was caused by urbanization patterns associated with what came to be known as the Third World syndrome (Castells, 1973; Quijano, 1977). Instead of the process for early-industrialized countries, which Davis characterized as an S-shaped curve extending over more than a century, the urbanization of developing nations was typified by a sudden and steady increase from the 1930s, and especially after 1945, mainly caused by rural-urban migrations (Drakakis-Smith, 1990, pp. 1–10). It was not accompanied by an industrial revolution – that had historically exerted a ‘pull’ effect on cities – but rather by an abandonment of the countryside that could be seen as a ‘push’ force. In addition to the fact that absolute numbers involved in Third World urbanization are larger than those of industrialized societies, the relative improvements in infrastructure, services and welfare standards in urban areas explain that, in relation to demographic transition, ‘Third World cities exemplify par excellence the combination of pre-industrial fertility with post-industrial mortality’ (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998, p. 12; see also Drakakis-Smith, 1990, pp. 1–10).

Instead of continuing here with a series of problems that will be addressed in later chapters, what is important in this introduction is to show that the way countries industrialized and urbanized is at the core of their modernization and, especially after the 1960s, their development. The past relationship between industrialization and urbanization is therefore related to today’s configuration of the First and Third Worlds, though these domains have been questioned, especially after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain that originally informed the Second World.³ At the same time, it is necessary to understand that the processes of industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development are closely linked in historical terms – a perspective that is often missed in studies that have tended to be ‘static’, as it has been pointed out in the literature (Savage and Warde, 1993, p. 41; Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998, p. 28).

This is the case with the few existing studies of globalization in Latin America, with the notable exception of Carlos de Mattos (2010) who will provide input to several of the chapters which follow. For the most part, case studies have been based on short-term comparisons between cities, relegating the continental and historical background that is essential for a better understanding of today’s metropolitan hierarchy and rationale (see, for example, Borja, 2007; Sassen, 2007). As a key to that pending exploration, the historical continuity of globalization in terms of the consideration of foreign capital as a fetish has been summarized by the Brazilian geographer Antonio Carlos Robert Moraes: ‘A “fictitious” appraisal of capital dominates this new moment that features “market” and “globalization” as guidelines. This is perhaps the contemporary nickname of the old colonial curse: to build the country and then to globalize it, as it was to civilize and modernize it in the past’ (Moraes, 2004, p. 142).⁴

So – aided by an urban historiography panorama that I intended to survey during my postdoctoral research – this book assumes a general and comparative standpoint, both in historical and territorial terms, which should enable us to trace a long-term vision of Latin America’s processes of urbanization and development throughout the twentieth century (Almandoz, 2008b, pp. 145–181).⁵ And such an attempt will require the incorporation of political, social and cultural variables that allow us to understand Latin America’s eventful and unique path towards development, most of it occurring within a Third World reality, but with promising changes as we move into the twenty-first century.

On Urban Cultural History and Latin America’s Overviews

The conception of modernization involves different dimensions of urbanization as a process, including not only the demographic transition referred to above, but also the territorial distribution of population and provision of services and equipment, together with the cultural changes associated with urbanization and civilization (Caves, 2005, pp. 503–505). The last is especially relevant for this book’s approach, though it does not imply that other aspects of modernization are to be neglected.

Micro-History and Panoramic Approaches

Since the 1980s, the dimensions of modernization and urbanization, with special reference to social change, cultural manifestations and forms of representation, have been combined in countless studies of the urban history of individual Latin American cities. This trend has been boosted by the diversity of sources and discourses assembled for re-creating, usually through a micro-historical approach, the social and cultural roles of different actors in a city, as well as their imaginaries and forms of expression (Sutcliffe, 1984; Burke, 2001). In fact, the incorporation of literary genres and non-specialized discourses – essay, narrative, poetry, travel chronicle, pictorial and cinematographic representation, among others – to the catalogue of traditional primary sources of urban and planning history – mainly comprised of technical and legal literature – has enhanced the documentary corpus of a new field that can be called urban cultural history.⁶

Besides mirroring a worldwide tendency to favour case studies of individual cities rather than addressing national or international contexts, today’s abundant collection of urban and planning histories in Latin America is a tributary of a mainstream of greater scope and depth in terms of both theory and historiography. As it has been summarized by Nancy Stieber in an article on the micro-history of the modern city, cultural and social history has often put aside both the ‘great narratives’ and the systemic approaches, derived from Marxist structuralism or from the Annales School’s longue durée, in order to develop more focused and micro-historical studies, in which the contingency and autonomy of cultural manifestations can be captured and stressed.

Despite their ideological, methodological, or philosophical differences, what is apparent from the recent reformulations of the relationship between society and culture is the movement from larger totalizing systems applied at large scales of time and geography to smaller-scale investigations of the social interactions through which culture is produced. There is a preference for the concrete over the schematic, an openness to observation, and a distrust of any theoretical construction that might prove constraining. Instead of framing historical problems with long-range developmental trajectories, historians read minute, empirically observable particularities to reveal the codes, forces, and processes at work in shaping cultural forms. There is a rejection of abstraction, the general scheme or concepts through which to interpret expression, in favor of the mapping of material practices, exposing the making of culture as active agent rather than passive reflection… (Stieber, 1999, p. 383)

Diverse theoretical influences, including those referring to the New History, both in its English and French versions characterized by Peter Burke, have contributed to this apparent dispersion of urban cultural history during the final decades of the twentieth century (Burke, 2001). Further, there is the influence of Michel de Certeau’s understanding of the ‘operation’ of historiography as one that combines ‘a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a craft, etc.), procedures of analysis (a discipline) and the construction of a text (a literature)’ (de Certeau, 1975, 2002, p. 64). Also, the work of David Harvey is especially pertinent for understanding the insertion of cultural forms and urban representation into post-modernity, since he pointed out that one of the ‘shifts’ after historical materialism was a ‘recognition’ of the importance of time and space as dimensions, manifested through the ‘geographies of social action’. Vital for the ‘geopolitics of capitalism’, these ‘organizing forces’ are capable of being materialized and spatialized through the ‘innumerable differences and otherness’ of social and cultural forms, including cities par excellence (Harvey, 1990, p. 355).

Notwithstanding the epistemological fragmentation of urban history, after more than two decades of historical development of the field, Stieber is optimistic about superseding and synthesizing the myriad of micro-history case studies: ‘We have reached the stage where we can expect an increasing harvest from the cross-fertilization tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Nineteenth-Century Antecedents
• 3 From Arielismo to World War I
• 4 Good Neighbourhood, Masificación and Urbanism
• 5 Developmentalism, Modernism and Planning
• 6 Between Cold War and Third World
• 7 Dismantling a Model
• 8 New Century and Old Demons
• Appendices
• References
• Index