Primate cities in Latin America: a theoretical framework based upon intra-urban driving forces

ABSTRACT

Excessive urban primacy in Latin American countries has been primarily analysed using country-level perspectives, while their intra-urban spatial forces have not been routinely used as explanatory elements. This paper addresses this gap by relating two country-level sources of urban primacy (the international economic dependence of Latin American countries and the rural bias of the political process), with three particularities of the Latin American spatial markets (lack of land taxes and exactions, informal mechanisms of access to land, and lobby-oriented oligopolistic formal developers). We develop graphic analytical frameworks where we can hypothesize the interactions between all these elements. In order to enhance the theoretical framework and contrast it with existing evidence, three emerging policies in the continent were added to the analysis: land taxation and exactions, tenure legalization, and global city development. By using the theoretical framework, we conclude that the combined effects of these emerging policies will determine primacy patterns similar to the ones currently prevailing.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• urban primacy
• urban policy
• land markets
• urban informality

Acknowledgements

The author thanks valuable comments by Colin Lizieri and Aiora Zabala while at the University of Cambridge, and the two anonymous referees of the journal. Further conversations with Meg and Gene Thorley are also greatly acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A very complete analytical presentation of the urban sizes regularities and their compliance with expected economic theory predictions in the case of the USA, can be found in Lobo, Bettencourt, Strumsky, and West (2013).

2. Latin American scale analyses include Murray and Clapham (2015) about urban housing, Gilbert (1998) about city spatial and social structures and Inostroza et al. (2013) about density and spatial development patterns.

3. Engerman and Sokoloff (2012) argue that the lack (or little importance) of property taxation has been one of the most stagnating institutional failures of Latin America, because it has resulted in lack of access to land ownership by the masses, disenfranchising them from influencing their local affairs. Conversely, local landowner elites have had excessive political influence, and have caused a rural bias of the political processes, regardless of the fact that the continent is now predominantly urban.

4. Fox (2014) describes very similar political arrangements and urban development patterns in Africa.

5. This argument builds upon Arnott (2009), about how excessive urban regulation seems more common in developing countries, in spite of having smaller formal economy sectors. This could be due to regulators trying to achieve the maximum average compliance when including informality, via increasing the required standards in the city sections where they have actual regulatory power.

6. This type of development is also visible in touristic cities such as Cancun or Cartagena.

7. A very compelling analysis of population densities when including the entire functional metropolitan areas of different Latin American cities can be consulted in Inostroza et al. (2013). This author makes it clear that suburbanization in the proper sense of the term is scarce in the continent, but scattered development in the sense we use in this document is common. Spatial illustrations and photographs, making a detailed portray of this type of development in the case of San Jose (Costa Rica), can be consulted in Van Lidth and Schutte (2010).