CJO Now Includes:

 and  

present the inaugural Journal of Latin American Studies Lecture

Moving on:
Rethinking Inequality and Migration in the Latin American City

Given by Professor Bryan Roberts

Friday May 30th 2008, 5pm,
Brunei Gallery, SOAS, Russell Square Campus, London [Map]

Latin American cities in the 1960s and 1970s were diverse in size and in their stages of growth and industrialization; but they shared the common context of Import Substituting Industrialization and of a population and economic concentration that contributed to political and administrative centralization.   The analysis of inequality and migration reflected this context, concentrating on how rural migrants ‘made’ the city creating their own shelter and, often, their own jobs through the informal economy.  The issue was the poverty and marginality of much of the urban population, but with an emphasis on the capacity of the poor to improve their situations through the provision of better job opportunities, help with housing and education for their children.
 
The issues facing contemporary Latin American cities are quite different, as a combined result of a change in global context and of the cumulative impact of the demographic, economic and social trends that have shaped Latin American cities since the 1970s.  The global context is one of greater freedom of trade, privatization, labor market de-regulation and a reduced role of the state in the economy. Cities and their spatial organization are affected to varying degrees by this context depending on the extent of their involvement in the international economy, but overall there has been a freeing of land markets and greater freedom for the private sector to provide housing, transport and communications infrastructure, and to develop large-scale commercial enterprises, such as megastores and shopping malls. The market is now organizing Latin American cities to an extent that had not occurred before.   Rural-urban migration is a small component of urban population change, and its importance  is replaced by a decline in the birth rate,  by the shrinking of the family and a change in its  composition,  by intra and inter urban migration and, in some countries, by international migration.

An important issue to be discussed is the way in which the earlier optimism implicit in the stress on the coping capacities of the poor has been replaced by a pessimism that emphasizes the structural exclusion of the poor from decent jobs and services and the ending of the social mobility that had characterized the cities of the 1970s.   Even the general improvement in the levels of urban services may contribute to these outcomes by making inequality in quality and increasingly sharp private-public divides intractable barriers to improving the life chances of the majority of the urban population.  In this context, socio-spatial segregation, citizen rights and social policy have become the decisive urban social and political issues for research.  The political changes of the end of the 1980s and 1990s brought both democratic and decentralized forms of government to the cities of Latin America and raised new issues for governance, particularly over the state’s increasingly direct involvement in the lives of city populations, the growing importance of Non Governmental Organizations and the reduced significance of traditional forms of representation, such as political parties or trade unions.  Decentralization and social policies, which are increasingly targeted, emphasize locality and its characteristics, often intensifying the inequalities resulting from segregation.   Finally, there are the ambiguous implications of these administrative and spatial changes for urban politics.  The emphasis on locality can undermine city-wide political coalitions, but to the extent that it encourages greater participation in civic action, it creates the basis for scaling-up collective action.

About Professor Bryan Roberts:

After completing a degree in History at Balliol College, Oxford, Bryan Roberts took a Doctorate in Sociology in Chicago in 1964. Returning to Britain, Roberts taught at the University of Manchester from 1964 to 1986, ending with a Chair in Sociology. During this period, he did field research in Guatemala, Peru and Mexico. In 1986, he came to Austin as a C.B. Smith Sr. Chair in US-Mexico Relations, focusing his research on urban poverty and employment in Latin America and, more recently, on spatial differentiation and citizenship and social policy.  Among his books are Organizing Strangers (1973), Cities of Peasants (1978), The Making of Citizens (1995), the coauthored, Migrants,Peasants and Entrepreneurs (1984) and various edited collections, including Rethinking Latin American Development (2005) with Charles Wood.  He is currently directing the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies.