Does planning keep its promises? latin American spatial governance and planning as an ex-post regularisation activity

ABSTRACT

Spatial governance and planning systems empower the public authority to steer and control spatial development. Whereas most comparative studies on how this occurs focus on the European continent, less knowledge is available on the global South incremental urbanisation. The cases of three Latin American countries – Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru – are here discussed, highlighting the role played by the logic of necessity (and the resulting necessity-market) as the main driver of plot-by-plot urbanisation. The analysis shows that, in the three countries, spatial governance and planning systems are scarcely capable to address societal needs ex-ante and limit their activity to ex-post regularisation actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial governance and planning systems
• necessity
• incremental urbanisation
• Latin America
• global South

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The Ecuadorian Buen Vivir and the Bolivian Vivir Bien translate to ‘Good Living’ in English.

2. In Bolivia, over a total of 339 municipalities, only three are metropolises (La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz); in Ecuador, over a total of 221 municipalities, only two are metropolises (Quito, Guayaquil); in Peru, over a total of 196 provincial municipalities, only one (Lima) is a metropolis (United Cities and Local Governments, 2016).

3. The territorial organisation is based on regions, provinces, cantons (i.e. municipalities), rural parishes, and special regimes (i.e. the autonomous metropolitan districts, the Galapagos province and the indigenous territorial districts) (Art. 42, 2008 Ecuadorian political constitution).

4. The ‘multilocality’ phenomenon consists in living part of the year in the rural area, employed in agricultural activities (e.g. coca cultivation), and part of the year in the urban context, employed in urban activities (e.g. taxi drivers, bricklayers, etc.).

5. Sacaba improved its cadastral system between 2014 and 2018 thanks to an Interamerican Development Bank’s program. However, this system is not yet operational, and the pace of urbanisation has quickly outdated the cartographic system.

6. The PUGS was enacted in 2021, but the corresponding ordinance has not yet been published in the Official Journal. As a consequence, the PUGS is not yet operational.

7. Rumiñahui’s case-study differs from those of Sacaba and Huancayo by having a predominance of informal constructions emerging spontaneously outside any organised process, rather than informal settlements whose development is coordinated by private operators and the necessity-market resulting from their action.

8. It should be pointed out that many contexts of the global North are not immune from informal/illegal urbanisation (e.g. Southern Italy, Greece and most countries in the Western Balkan Region. Berisha & Cotella, 2021). Similarly, most metropolises and intermediary cities across the global South regulate some share of their urbanisation through spatial governance and planning activity.