Introduction to Special Theme Practice Forum: Latin American Spatial Planning beyond Clichés

ABSTRACT

There is no spatial planning in Latin America, or so the cliché goes. As it turns out, Latin America is vast and variegated and planning capacities vary tremendously across the region. Latin American cities face a variety of challenges and may seem disorganised and chaotic, but their problem is not lack of planning, but the tremendous challenges of rapid urbanization in weak institutional contexts, where planning happens ‘post-facto’ and many citizens are currently excluded from the benefits of planned urbanization. This state of affairs is made more acute by the seemingly unending struggle between redistribution policies and neoliberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• urban planning
• spatial planning
• territorial governance
• Latin American planning cultures

A common cliché when discussing urbanization in Latin America is that ‘cities in the region are not planned’ or that ‘there is no spatial planning in Latin America’. This is something not only laymen say, but it is so often repeated even some planners believe it.

But as it turns out, Latin Americans are planning furiously. To be sure, planning capacities vary tremendously around the region, as do everything else: from economic and institutional capacity to the quality of democratic institutions, to technical know-how. Latin America is a vast and variegated region, and so is Latin American planning.

But why does the cliché persist? At first sight, Latin American metropolises may feel disorganised and chaotic, although many medium and small cities may feel much more convivial. What Latin Americans mean when they say cities in the region are not ‘planned’ is that cities in the region do not follow a pre-determined vision or path of development (although there has been an abundance of spatial visions for Latin America cities), there is no sectoral integration and no coordination. Most importantly, many Latin American citizens are excluded from the benefits of planned urbanization. City administrations are almost always planning ‘post-facto’, that is, the private sector and citizens are continuously building, often without much direction. Urban services and infrastructures must be provided once neighbourhoods are consolidated.

But not everything is ‘spontaneous’ or ‘informal’. Large swaths of large Latin American metropolises are planned and designed, or follow some sort of spatial framework or plan. Even ignoring the very much planned cities of ancient civilizations, like the Mayas and Aztecs, a good number of Latin American cities were built following some sort of spatial plan: first the Spanish grid, then the hygienist ideas of the nineteenth century, attempts to imitate the European Hausmannian model of great boulevards at the tun of last century, the large tree-lined avenues designed by Robert Moses for a number of Latin American metropolises to incentivise the use of cars in the 1940s, the rationalist/modernist experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, the large urban projects of the neoliberal 1990s, to the public private partnerships (PPPs) of the 2000s.

Planning results are varied: from the solid regular blocks of Buenos Aires to the sinuous alleys of Salvador. There are enormous differences in terms of urban form, infrastructure and access to services. Planned and unplanned (or informal) coexist and intertwine. Devolution and local planning capacities also vary tremendously, and so do the tools available to planners, embedded in different political contexts.

However, there are a few commonalities worth highlighting. First and foremost, the democratic deficit in the region, with young and faulty democracies, has produced social exclusion giving rise to spatial separation. Those excluded from formal ways of financing and building the city will often take their housing needs into their own hands and literally ‘help themselves’, creating what in Brazil Grostein (1987) called ‘the clandestine city’. Informal urbanization co-exists with planned neighbourhoods. The article about Brazilian planning delves into the relationship between planned and unplanned, and explores how social movements originating in Brazilian favelas and in the peripheries of great Brazilian metropolises have managed to influence the writing of a progressive constitution after the military regime that ended in 1986. This progressive constitution harboured innovative tools for urban planning and management designed to ensure citizen’s ‘right to the city’ and the ‘social function of property’ in Brazilian cities. The article also describes how progressive legislation and planning tools often fail to materialise into better urban environments and how planning can be used as a tool for social exclusion.

The Colombian case illustrates another common problem: the faith in technocratic solutions, often originating in Europe or the United States, and failing to acknowledge local structural limitations. The article explores the causes of an alleged spatial planning crisis in Colombia, and highlights national structural hindrances for planning in the country, including a neo-liberal oriented restructuring of the Colombian economy. It identifies two issues that the author sees as crucial for the success of planning: the way in which private property is conceived on one hand, and devolution and territorial organization on the other. The region’s colonial heritage has largely influenced conceptions on patrimony, the rights and duties of landowners and what is acceptable in terms of societal redistribution (including the redistribution of burdens and benefits of urban development, a discussion very much present in all articles published here).

This is also the focus of the Argentinean article, in which the author explores the role of urban planning in the management of land value increments resulting from direct government action. The author looks at how large urban projects produce a land value increment, how these economic gains are captured by local governments, and how these benefits are distributed. The issue of redistribution is central to the discussion of whether spatial planning is effective in Latin America, beyond the simple realisation that planning is very much alive in the continen. Technocratic or participatory, old-fashioned or innovative, imported or indigenous, centralised or devolved, all these attributes can be found in planning systems and tools around the continent. One issue remains: spatial planning has largely failed to promote more equal and democratic cities in the region.

And indeed, the article on Peruvian planning asks about the role of planning in a context of high inequality and extensive informal urbanization. It strives to explain Peruvian planning according to a theoretical framework which understands planning as an institution. Results show how a fragmented, incoherent and profuse legal framework turns the planning system into a black box, reducing planning matters to legal issues. This fixation with legal procedures has prevented Peruvian planning approaches from departing from early modernist models centred in strict zoning and building codes. Despite great changes in the planning legislation to adapt it to neoliberal principles, the implementation of a process of deviolution to Peruvian regions and the introduction of environmental planning, the Peruvian planning approach is still far from strategic planning. Peru’s persistent inequality negatively affect all institutional planning levels, constrained by widespread societal values and practices that exclude a large part of the population from economic and social opportunities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.