URBAN LATIN AMERICA Life in the Megacity
"Those who know about ancient Greece," says Eduardo Galeano in his essay on the auto-centered city, "say the city was born as a meeting place for people." In their essay on Buenos Aires, Graciela...
...As in the United States, an economic model based on lower wages and fiscal retrenchment has left cities with few resources with which to combat modern versions of the urban plague...
...As those few protect their wealth and buy the services they need, urban policy has become one of accelerated privatization and lowered expectations...
...Members of the polis-free-born males with the right ancestry-melded the private and public spheres, and practiced collective, democratic self-governance...
...But given the scale of migration, the opportunities are too scarce to go around...
...Human contact," says Rub6n Martinez, "creates character and history...
...are in the same fix...
...t is from their overgrown capital cities that the region's nations are governed-which is ironic because these cities can barely govern themselves...
...On the other hand, a privileged, well-placed few reap the enormous rewards of new global markets...
...Burgeoning Latin American metropolises such as Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro embody the usual contradictions of the capitalist city, with an extra dose of underdevelopment...
...Though it was characterized by patriarchy, xenophobia and indentured servitude, the polis has paradoxically been a touchstone of the humane critique of alienated city life...
...As the region leaves its rural past behind, people are crowding together in settings replete with what Raymond Williams once called "a sense of possibility, meeting and movement...
...But then one notices that New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C...
...The city attracts but cannot absorb...
...The polis represented a triumph of human agency, a self-determined city, "a hand held up to fate," in Socrates' famous words...
...The Greek polis was no paradise, but a look in that direction seems necessary for those who wish to recreate some semblance of the urban community...
...It is the communal impulse that animates and humanizes city life, but capital accumulation-not community-is the driving force of the modern city...
...Instead, they found that negotiation, rather than mobilization was the only way to govern the city, and that the minority of powerful businessmen could not be bypassed...
...Urbanization has long been a product of capitalist growth, and it is no coincidence that Latin America's rapid insertion into the global capitalist economy is widely felt-in ways our two-part rural-urban series have explored-as the decline and disappearance of the countryside and the explosive growth of the metropolis...
...In the corporate city, the conflicting urban impulses of neighborhood versus real estate, mutual aid versus upward mobility, the bodega versus the stock exchange, are particularly strong...
...But human contact faces obstacles in modem city life...
...While the Left has been fairly successful in getting elected at the municipal level, it has discovered that its room to maneuver is limited by forces beyond its control...
...Maybe there is something about the structure of the global political economy that won't let any city hold its hand up to fate-or up to the dominant interests of the global economy...
...In their essay on Buenos Aires, Graciela Silvestri and Adridn Gorelik contrast public-centered Greek antiquity with the modem, market-driven city governed by a seeming "absence of intentions, politics and the state...
...They are centers of commerce and commodities, civilization and culture, crime and corruption, immense wealth and immense poverty...
...As Thomas Angotti explains, the cities of Latin America remain magnets for the rural population because they still offer greater opportunities than the decaying countryside...
...In the Latin American context, this report considers some of the consequences...
...The capitalist logic of urban development mitigates against the former in favor of the latter...
...For Aristotle, the pursuit of the good life was political-and inconceivable outside the polis: an individual could become fully human only in the nurturing environment of the self-governing community...
...In the age of hegemonic global markets-the age of neoliberalism-one is tempted to argue that Northern capital won't let the cities of the periphery become self-governing...
...When Luiza Erundina was elected mayor of Sao Paulo in 1988, her Worker's Party (PT) followers expected quick action through popular rule...
...Increasingly, therefore, Latin America's cities are riven by stark inequalities...
...And while Lima's self-built shantytown, Villa El Salvador, has the virtue of self-managed blocks, it nevertheless, as Jo-Marie Burt reports in this issue, finds itself too far from the centers of real power-and too lacking in its own resources-to be able to govern itself effectively...
...Caracas' radical mayor, Arist6bulo Istdriz, complains that 70% of his city is out of political-and police-control...
...On the one hand, a growing 11 VOL XXVIII, NO 4 JAN/FEB 1995URBAN REPORT population of the poor hustles in the informal economy and lives in flimsy housing in the farflung urban periphery...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 4
