DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Inward vs. Outward Expansion of Cities

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo González*

SANTIAGO, Sep 23 2003 (IPS) - Latin America’s large cities continue to encroach on agricultural areas in an incessant process of expansion. One reasonable solution, say town planners, would be to grow inwards, by building high-rises, for example.

But urban development does not necessarily occur in a rational manner in this region, they pointed out to IPS.

From 1960 to 1998, the population of the central portion of Mexico City rose twofold, while it grew more than 11 times in outlying parts of the city, said architect and city planner Angel Mercado at the Autonomous Metropolitan University.

The metropolitan area of Mexico City encompassed 156,188 hectares and was home to 17.3 million people in 2000, and experts project that the urbanised area will have grown to 200,888 hectares, with a population of 20.4 million, by 2010. That means demographic density is expected to drop from 111 to 102 inhabitants per hectare, he said.

The outlying areas are also growing, due to occupations of land by poor families, leading to the emergence of slum neighbourhoods, as well as the construction of developments for middle-class residents and posh suburban communities for wealthy families keen on escaping the noise and air pollution of the more densely populated urban areas of Mexico City.

Buenos Aires proper has a population of three million, but the greater Buenos Aires is home to 12 million, ”with a growing process of suburbanisation,” although the Argentine capital stands out from other large Latin American cities in that ”the rich never really left the city,” architect Alicia Novik told IPS.

In neighbouring Brazil, city planner Renato Cymbalista, with the non-governmental organisation Instituto Polis, said ”The horizontal growth of cities is a Brazilian tradition. But since the 1980s it has taken on a more negative character in Sao Paulo,” the country’s biggest city.

Now ”it has less to do with rural migration to the cities than with the displacement of the urban population from the centre to the periphery.”

The number of inhabitants of the historic centre of Sao Paulo shrank from 526,170 in 1980 to 373,914 in 2000, while the population of Cidade Tiradentes, an outlying area that used to mark the limit between urban and rural, skyrocketed from 8,603 to 190,657 between 1980 and 2000.

In Bogota, the urban area doubled from 17,000 hectares in 1980 to 35,000 today, and 43 percent of the neighbourhoods in the Colombian capital are irregular settlements, or shanty-towns. Each year, 700,000 new inhabitants flock to the city, architect Luz Angela Mondragón, assistant director of Construction and Public Spaces in the city’s Department of District Planning, said in an interview.

In the Chilean capital, the population of the central Santiago district dropped slightly between the last two censuses, from 230,977 in 1992 to 200,792 in 2002. By contrast, Maipú, the fastest-growing outlying district, grew from 273,521 to 468,390 inhabitants in the same decade.

The central Santiago district has 77,514 housing units, including 26,635 houses and 45,218 apartment units in high-rise buildings. In Maipú, on the other hand, there are 111,139 houses and just 13,403 apartments.

The construction of high-rises in Santiago is a new phenomenon, linked to the March 1985 earthquake that destroyed one-third of the buildings in the city centre, and the rebuilding process that got underway in the 1990s, the head of the programme to ”repopulate” the capital, Bernabé Aravena, told IPS.

Through that programme, 40 of around 60 ruins and empty lots have been rebuilt. Since 1990, 280 high-rises have gone up, ranging in size from 50 apartment units to 600 condominiums. ”We’re talking about 2.5 million square metres in building permits, and more than 30,000 housing units,” said the official.

The regulations establish that new buildings in the centre of the Chilean capital must be between five and 26 stories. To encourage people to move back into the area, the state offers discounts on the cost of apartments for those who open savings accounts for housing in local banks.

A January 2003 modification of building regulations in Santiago stipulates that the original facades of more than 620 buildings must be preserved, even if the interior is remodeled to create housing units, added Aravena.

”There are many advantages to repopulating the city centre,” said the regional secretary of Chile’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning, Víctor Manuel González.

”I would stress, for example, being able to take better advantage of under-used public services infrastructure. It is also very important to create market conditions that can compete with the urban expansion that implies encroaching on agricultural land.”

In Sao Paulo, attempts to revitalise the historic city centre and adjoining neighbourhoods have included the reinstallation of public services like water and electricity in old buildings, and the opening of cultural centres in historic edifices.

But the Downtown Homeless Movement has also staged occupations of buildings. The Movement’s squatters moved into four unoccupied buildings, including three old hotels, in July.

”The demographic tendency has not yet been reverted. There are more people leaving the city centre than arriving,” said Cymbalista.

”The centre will continue to empty out if authorities fail to put mechanisms in place to lower the cost of real estate,” added the architect, who also proposed charging the owners of unoccupied buildings high taxes.

In the city of Medellin in northwest Colombia, a law was passed that sets high priority on making use of the city centre. However, a similar bill in Bogota failed to win approval, which left the door open to real estate speculation.

For that reason, the momentum has gone out of attempts to repopulate the centre of the Colombian capital, which began in the 1980s.

”The city’s statutes have been highly contradictory: while some are aimed at boosting the number of people living in downtown areas, others fuel horizontal expansion,” said Mondragón.

In Buenos Aires, Puerto Madero and Palermo Viejo are examples of restored urban areas. The city government wants to do the same with districts on the southside of the capital, but the severe economic crisis has stood in the way of such efforts.

The experts consulted by IPS in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Chile agreed on the high costs to the environment of the horizontal expansion of cities, which also creates growing demand for roads and transportation services, to enable those living in outlying areas to commute to their jobs and make use of the services available in the city centre.

In the slums and shanty-towns that ring the large cities of Latin America, housing shortages are accompanied by difficulties in access to piped water, electricity, sewage services, schools and health clinics, while the city centres generally provide good public services.

One exception is Mexico City, where no policy for building high-rises has been adopted, and a programme to draw people back to the city centre has been unsuccessful, partly due to the poor quality of run-down water pipe and sewage infrastructure, said Mercado.

”One of the debates that the media and academics particularly enjoy is whether the city should grow outwards or inwards, by increasing population density,” said Chilean Housing Minister Jaime Ravinet in an Aug. 27 speech. ”But I think it’s a stupid argument, because the growth of the city is unstoppable.

”Not even the walls of the Middle Ages curbed the growth of cities, let alone the town planner’s pencil,” said the official, who launched the initiative to rebuild and revive the city centre when he was mayor of Santiago from 1990 to 2000.

The important thing, according to Ravinet, is that the real estate and construction companies involved in the outwards expansion be forced to help foot the bill for the installation of basic services and the creation of roads.

With 100 people per hectare, Santiago is not a city of low density, he said, noting that Sao Paulo and Mexico City have 150 inhabitants per hectare, Calcutta 364, Rome 70, and London, Berlin and New York just 40 to 50.

The question is deciding ”whether we want to be Calcutta or London. In all modesty, I would opt for London,” said the minister, whose urban expansion plans have drawn loud criticism from environmental organisations.

* Diego Cevallos in Mexico, María Isabel García in Colombia, Mario Osava in Brazil, and Marcela Valente in Argentina contributed to this report.