Review Urban planning and historiography in Latin America * Arturo Almandoz * Departamento de Planificacio ´n Urbana, Universidad Simo ´n Bolı ´var, Edificio MEU, Piso 1, Apartado 89000, Caracas 1086, Venezuela 0305-9006/$ - see front matter q 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.progress.2006.02.002 Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 www.elsevier.com/locate/pplann Abbreviations AECI, Agencia Espan ˜ola de Cooperacio ´n Internacional (Spanish Agency of International Cooperation); AfP, Alianza para el Progreso (Alliance for Progress); ANPRM, Asociacio ´n Nacional para la Planificacio ´n de la Repu ´blica Mexicana (National Association for the Planning of the Mexican Republic); ANPUR, Associac ¸ao Nacional de Pos-graduac ¸ao e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional (National Association of Graduate and Research Studies on Urbanism), Brazil; CEHOPU, Centro de Estudios Histo ´ricos de Obras Pu ´blicas (Centre of Historical Studies of Public Works), Spain; CEE, Comisio ´n de Este ´tica Edilicia (Commission of Building Aesthetic), Buenos Aires; CEUR, Centro de Estudios Urbanos (Centre of Urban Studies), Buenos Aires; CIAM, Congre `s International d’Architecture Moderne (International Congress of Modern Architecture); CIHE, Centro de Investigaciones Histo ´ricas y Este ´ticas (Centre of Historical and Aesthetical Research), Caracas; CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Council of Social Sciences); CNU, Comisio ´n Nacional de Urbanismo (National Commission of Planning), Venezuela; DGOPU, Direccio ´ n General de Obras Pu ´ blicas y Urbanismo (General Direction of Public Works and Urban Planning), Argentina; EC, European Community; ECLA, Economic Commission for Latin America; EFU, E ´ cole Franc ¸aise d’Urbanisme (French School of Town Planning); ENBA, Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Arts), Brazil; ETSAB, Escuela Te ´cnica de Arquitectura de Barcelona (Barcelona’s Technical School of Architecture), Spain; GEU, Grupo de Estudios Urbanos (Group of Urban Studies), Uruguay; ICA, International Congresses of Americanists; IEAL, Instituto de Estudios de Administracio ´ n Local (Institute of Local Administration Studies), Madrid; IMF, International Monetary Fund; ISPJAE, Jose ´ Antonio Echeverrı ´a Polytechnic Institute, Havana; JNP, Junta Nacional de Planificacio ´n (National Board of Planning), Cuba; OAS, Organization of American States; RNIU, Red Nacional de Investigacio ´n Urbana (National Network of Urban Research), Mexico; SFU, Socie ´te Franc ¸aise des Urbanistes (French Association of Town Planners); SIAP, Sociedad Interamericana de Planificacio ´n (Inter-American Society of Planning); UBA, University of Buenos Aires; UCCI, Unio ´n de Ciudades Capitales Iberoamericanas (Union of Iberian America’s Capital Cities); UDF, University of the Federal District, Mexico; UNR, National University of Rosario, Argentina; URM, University Reform Movement (Movimiento de Reforma Universitaria), Argentina; WB, World Bank. * This article is drawn from a postdoctoral research about Latin America’s urban historiography, developed by the author at the Centro de Investigaciones Posdoctorales (CIPOST), Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. Under the title ‘The Transfer and Shaping of Urban Historiography in Mid-20th century Latin America’, a preliminary version was presented at the 11th Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS). Planning Models and the Culture of Cities. Barcelona: 14–17 July, 2004. * Corresponding author. Tel.: C58 212 906 4037; Fax: C58 212 906 4040/551 2547. E-mail address: [email protected]
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Review
Urban planning and historiography in Latin America*
Arturo Almandoz*
Departamento de Planificacion Urbana, Universidad Simon Bolıvar, Edificio MEU, Piso 1, Apartado 89000,
Caracas 1086, Venezuela
Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123
www.elsevier.com/locate/pplann
0305-9006/$ - see front matter q 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.progress.2006.02.002
Abbreviations AECI, Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional (Spanish Agency of International
Cooperation); AfP, Alianza para el Progreso (Alliance for Progress); ANPRM, Asociacion Nacional para la
Planificacion de la Republica Mexicana (National Association for the Planning of the Mexican Republic);
ANPUR, Associacao Nacional de Pos-graduacao e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional (National
Association of Graduate and Research Studies on Urbanism), Brazil; CEHOPU, Centro de Estudios Historicos de
Obras Publicas (Centre of Historical Studies of Public Works), Spain; CEE, Comision de Estetica Edilicia
(Commission of Building Aesthetic), Buenos Aires; CEUR, Centro de Estudios Urbanos (Centre of Urban
Studies), Buenos Aires; CIAM, Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (International Congress of
Modern Architecture); CIHE, Centro de Investigaciones Historicas y Esteticas (Centre of Historical and
Aesthetical Research), Caracas; CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American
Council of Social Sciences); CNU, Comision Nacional de Urbanismo (National Commission of Planning),
Venezuela; DGOPU, Direccion General de Obras Publicas y Urbanismo (General Direction of Public Works and
Urban Planning), Argentina; EC, European Community; ECLA, Economic Commission for Latin America; EFU,
Ecole Francaise d’Urbanisme (French School of Town Planning); ENBA, Escola Nacional de Belas Artes
(National School of Fine Arts), Brazil; ETSAB, Escuela Tecnica de Arquitectura de Barcelona (Barcelona’s
Technical School of Architecture), Spain; GEU, Grupo de Estudios Urbanos (Group of Urban Studies), Uruguay;
ICA, International Congresses of Americanists; IEAL, Instituto de Estudios de Administracion Local (Institute of
Local Administration Studies), Madrid; IMF, International Monetary Fund; ISPJAE, Jose Antonio Echeverrıa
Polytechnic Institute, Havana; JNP, Junta Nacional de Planificacion (National Board of Planning), Cuba; OAS,
Organization of American States; RNIU, Red Nacional de Investigacion Urbana (National Network of Urban
Research), Mexico; SFU, Societe Francaise des Urbanistes (French Association of Town Planners); SIAP,
Sociedad Interamericana de Planificacion (Inter-American Society of Planning); UBA, University of Buenos
Aires; UCCI, Union de Ciudades Capitales Iberoamericanas (Union of Iberian America’s Capital Cities); UDF,
University of the Federal District, Mexico; UNR, National University of Rosario, Argentina; URM, University
Reform Movement (Movimiento de Reforma Universitaria), Argentina; WB, World Bank.* This article is drawn from a postdoctoral research about Latin America’s urban historiography, developed by the
author at the Centro de Investigaciones Posdoctorales (CIPOST), Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas.
Under the title ‘The Transfer and Shaping of Urban Historiography in Mid-20th century Latin America’, a
preliminary version was presented at the 11th Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS).
Planning Models and the Culture of Cities. Barcelona: 14–17 July, 2004.* Corresponding author. Tel.: C58 212 906 4037; Fax: C58 212 906 4040/551 2547.
Brunner’s influential Manual de urbanismo also confirmed the penetration of
evolutionist ideas in Latin America’s professional milieus, as it was pointed out in
relation to his conception of the trends of the discipline As of the structure of his work, the
author stated that ‘history of the cities’ had significant importance in the first part, focused
on ‘urban evolution’, as well as in the third, devoted to the ‘urban art or urbanization’
(Brunner, 1939, I: 24–25). Only a year after the appearance of Mumford’s The Culture of
Cities (1938),5 Brunner’s manual also picked up its idea—inherited in turn from Geddes
and the French evolutionists—regarding the determination of the 20th century’s urban
agenda by the problems of the industrial city. In this respect, Brunner pointed out the
5 Translated into Spanish almost twenty years later (Mumford, 1957).
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 93
‘disjointed image’ of the metropolis from the second half of the 19th century, which
evinced that ‘the humanity lost the sense of continuity in its gradual cultural progress,
making mistakes whose consequences were disastrous for the advance of human
civilization’ (Brunner, 1939–1940, I: 13–15).6
This critical historicism regarding the contemporary metropolis was to some extent
indicative—as Violich noticed during his trip—of the generalized influence that
evolutionism had in Latin America’s professional culture by the time when urbanismo
was being shaped as a discipline.
But Brunner’s leading role and compromises as practitioner and international adviser
seems to have prevailed over the gloomy evolutionism for his final adoption of a more
optimistic position regarding the feasible consolidation of a both scientific and practical
discipline. The apprehensions concerning the industrial metropolis did not prevent him
from developing numerous projects in Austria, Chile and Colombia, as we know. Ranging
from urban plans to satellite towns and working-class housing aligned with the social
concerns of the Baupolitik tradition, in some of those projects Brunner borrowed from the
modernist models he also criticized (Hofer, 2003).
Also in Argentina, from Carlos Marıa Morales’s 1900s writings through the CEE’s
1925 plan for Buenos Aires, a notion of ‘urban evolution’ sought to synthesize, in a
preliminary and operative way, the historical components reckoned as necessary for the
planning or design of the project, trying at the same time to legitimise the discipline as
such (Novick, 2003: 10–12). Mainly drawn from Lavedan, this evolutionist approach of a
morphological history was led by Carlos Marıa della Paolera, coordinator of the capital’s
Plan Regulador since 1932. Not only in the case of Buenos Aires, his participation in the
plans for other Argentine and Uruguayan cities mirrored his preference for a ‘science of
the plans’ that combined l’esprit geometrique of the urban form with the evolution of its
organism (Randle, 1977: 19).
The evolutionist concern that for so long had been shared by Argentina’s urbanistas was
finally rewarded with the arrival of the French maestros. Invited by della Paolera, who had
been his disciple at the Institute of Urbanism, in 1948 Poete inaugurated at the UBA a
version of his Parisian course under the same title: Evolution des agglomerations
humaines.
After another invitation by della Paolera, also Bardet lectured in Brazil’s Belo
Horizonte and in Buenos Aires, where he lived for a year in the late 1940s and taught more
instrumental than historical courses (Randle, 1972: 32–33). In the midst of curricular
changes rapidly taking place in Argentine universities since the University Reform
Movement (URM) initiated in 1918,7 the symbiosis between these foreign urbanistes and
local pioneers represented an early expression of a comprehensive practice where history
of art and evolutionism came together in their concern for the urban form and organism,
thus providing foundations for historiography and planning at the same time.
6 My translation of: ‘la humanidad perdio el sentido de continuidad en su progreso cultural paulatino, para incurrir
en errores cuyas consecuencias fueron desastrosas para el progreso de la civilizacion humana’.7 Spread from Cordoba to other Argentine and Latin American universities, the URM ‘called for democratic
reforms and for the cultivation of the ‘indigenous spirit’ as opposed to the ‘materialist’ attitudes fostered by the
export-economy operated by the liberal elites’ (Williamson, 1992: 318).
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–12394
So even though pioneers such as Brunner and della Paolera are not especially known for
their work on historiography, it can be noted that, on the one hand, they seemed to follow
the examples of Geddes, Poete and Bardet, who had early shown an interest for linking the
urban evolution with the professional town planning and civic studies. On the other, they
epitomized an epistemological moment in which the historical conception of the first
urbanistas, not yet planners as such, was marked by some morphology and evolutionism
that influenced, though did not determine, practical orientations. Albeit for more
professional than aesthetic purposes, Brunner and della Paolera still looked for old forms
for new plans, as it had happened in the academic tradition that they tried to leave behind.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 95
3
Developmentalism, modernism and planning
3.1. Imbalance between industrialization and urbanization
More than a half of the population of Uruguay (78.0), Argentina (65.3), Chile (58.4)
and Venezuela (53.2) already lived in urban centres by 1950. While Latin America’s
average percentage of urbanization was still 41.6, some other countries such as Brazil and
Mexico were not demographically urban because of their huge populations, but boasted
long since some of the world’s greatest metropolises (United Nations, 1996: 47). Mexico
City and Rio de Janeiro were just below and above 3 million, respectively, while Sao Paulo
had already spiralled to 2.5 million. This first rank of Latin America’s metropolitan areas
was still led by the Great Buenos Aires, which amounted to 4.7 million (Harris, 1971: 167)
From the end of the second world war until the mid-1960s, Latin America’s biggest
countries showed a relative prosperity, marked by significant economic expansion amidst
sustained urbanization. Fuelled by the massive markets targeted by the import substitution
industrialization (ISI), Brazil and Mexico reached a yearly growth of 6% , what made them
look as model economies on the eve of ‘taking off’ towards development, in terms of
Rostow’s phases (Rostow, 1990). Even though the Southern Cone countries had been
more dynamic in the inter-war period, they still maintained a level of growth about 4%
(Clichevsky, 1990: 22–23). Meanwhile, epitomized by the windfall of oil-producer
Venezuela, the surplus yielded by the export of raw materials financed a second generation
of ISI also in Colombia and Peru, in all which the rate of industrial growth almost doubled
that of the primary sector (Williamson, 1992: 334–335).
The modernizing climate was imbued with an economic nationalism that was shared by
Latin America’s socialism and liberalism alike. It ranged from the populist regimes of
Mexico’s Lazaro Cardenas (1934–1940), Argentina’s Juan D. Peron (1946–1955) and
Brazil’s Getulio Vargas, to the progressive yet brutal dictatorships of Cuba’s Fulgencio
Batista (1940–1944, 1952–1959) and Venezuela’s Marcos Perez Jimenez (1952–1958).
Their common agenda of desarrollismo (‘developmentalism’) was backed since 1948 by
the creation of international agencies such as the Organization of American States (OAS)
and the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), both sponsored by the United
Nations (UN) and the USA’s growing interest in the region’s primary and industrial
exploitation. Headquartered in Santiago de Chile and led by Raul Prebisch—former
director general of Argentina’s Central Bank—the ECLA was a cornerstone of Latin
America’s post-war developmentalism, aimed at implemmenting ISI and other economic
policies that consolidated the ‘corporate state’ in industrializing countries until the mid-
1960s, when the ‘easy phase’ of ISI would be over (Williamson, 1992: 338–339).8
8 I wish to acknowledge the comments of one of the readers of the first version of this article submitted toPlanning in
Progress, who stressed the importance of developmentalism—the English term is taken from him or her—during the
first phase of ECLA. Following Williamson’s interpretation (1992: 333), I previously tended to directly associate
ECLA with the critical thinking of the School of Dependence, which would emerge later, as we shall see.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–12396
Initially regarded as promising examples of developing countries—a category that
seemed to have great resonance until the 1960s—most of Latin America’s industrializing
societies were supposed to be exponents of the classic theory of modernization, as it was
explained by the theory of economic growth and the functionalist sociology. From the
early 1960s, the connection between industrialization, urbanization and modernization
was formulated, following an almost causal derivation, by Leonard Reissman and
Kingsley Davis, from the standpoints of social change and demographic transition, relying
on the examples of the North Atlantic countries that had industrialized in the 19th century
(Reissman, 1970; Davis, 1982).9 From that literature could be drawn that Latin America’s
developing nations seemed to be in the path towards urbanization and industrialization, but
they actually suffered from profound distortions by comparison with successful
experiences of modernization in Europe, North America and other parts of the world.
On the one hand, a fledgling industrialization had not preceded but rather followed
urbanization in Latin America, so the ISI was not the equivalent of an ‘industrial
revolution’ with its dynamic effects on the economic system and demographic transition
and flows (Williamson, 1992: 333). As it happened in other parts of what was about to be
known as the Third World, instead of having pulled to cities waves of population which
could be actually absorbed by manufacturing and other productive sectors, most of Latin
America’s rural–urban migration was pushed by a countryside that had been abandoned
after the urban-focused policies carried on by corporate states (Potter and Lloyd-Evans,
1998: 12–13). The adoption of ISI had aggravated the rural crisis in many countries that
had not undergone land reforms: not only the labour force engaged in agriculture declined
in the 1945–1962 period, but also its productivity in terms of per capita Gross National
Product (GNP) was, in the best of the cases, less than one fourth of the USA’s for the same
period (Harris, 1971: 74; Williamson, 1992: 337–338).
On the other hand, levels of urbanization almost doubled industrial participation in the
economies of Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil, according to 1950s censuses
(Harris, 1971: 85). Such levels were not possible to be absorbed by the productive system, so
in the long term would produce ‘urban inflation’ or ‘hyper-urbanisation’, as it would happen in
other parts of the Third World (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 14–15). In the decades to come,
this surplus of unproductive population living in cities could only be accommodated in slums,
shanty-towns and the informal economy. But it was already clear by the early 1960s that
neither development nor modernization, understood as the outcome stated by ECLA’s
developmentalism and functionalist sociology, would result from Latin America’s imbalance
between industrialization and urbanization.
3.2. From urbanismo to planificacion
While developmentalism remained elusive in economic and social terms, some of Latin
America’s metropolises strived to exhibit a modernist image that, in view of the imbalance
9 Davis’s well-known interpretation was included in the popular volume The City (1965), which was translated
into Spanish in 1967. Reissman’s The Urban Process. Cities in Industrial Societies (1964) took a bit longer, but
reached a great distribution from the Escuela Tecnica de Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB), which also
translated many other titles from English (Reissman, 1972).
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 97
between industrialization and urbanization, also resulted incomplete and distorted. But it must
be recognized that architectural modernism was a showcase for displaying the rapid moder-
nization pursued by economic developmentalism, whose nationalist ingredients coloured
vernacular and genuine modernismos in some of Latin America’s developing countries. The
peculiarity of ‘alternative modernism’ reached its peak where the ‘alliance between moder-
nizing governments and modernist architects’ took place, as in the cases of Mexico, Brazil and
Venezuela, whose university cities, housing projects and administrative buildings were
ranked among the world’s best exponents of the modern movement (Fraser, 2000: 15–18).
Foreign and especially US interest for reporting and explaining Latin America’s modernism
was early manifested. Regional maestros such as Mexico’s Juan O’Gorman, Brazil’s Lucio
Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, followed by Venezuela’s Carlos Raul Villanueva, were
catalogued in the exhibitions ‘Brazil Builds’ (Goodwin, 1943) and ‘Modern Architecture in
Latin America since 1945’, organized by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern
Art, the latter with the famous critic Henry-Russel Hitchcock as curator (Hitchcock, 1955).
In the domain of urbanism, major foreign influences in post-war Latin America also shifted
from academicism to functionalist modernism, which was put, like developmentalism and
industrialization, at the service of the progressive goals of democracies and dictatorships
alike. Before the eclipse of academic urbanism, Hannes Meyer’s left-wing rationalism was
introduced in Mexico during the 1939–1949 stay of the former Bauhaus director, who had
been invited by President Cardenas. The modern legacy in other Latin American capitals was
enriched during the 1940s, especially through the visits of CIAM luminaries as advisors of the
new planning institutions, some of which came to have national competence. In Le
Corbusier’s second proposal for Buenos Aires, prepared with Argentine architects Kurchan
and Ferrari and published in 1947, the analysis of the ‘cardiac system’ of the inner city,
including the integration of traditional avenues and new ‘motorways’, was complemented in
the suburbs with the proposals of radiant cities, satellite towns and a green belt. The
application of the principles of zoning differentiated the urban areas according to their
functional coherence, putting aside the predominance traditionally given to the monumental
articulation of spaces and axes like the Plaza and Avenida de Mayo. While Le Corbusier’s
other trips to Bogota were to crystallize in a 1950 plan, CIAM’s theoretical presence would be
consolidated with the Spanish edition of the 1941 Charte d’Athenes, published in Argentina in
1954, completed with its Cuban adaptation in Martınez Inclan’sCodigo de Urbanismo. After
visits to Havana of modernist maestros such as Richard Neutra (1945), Walter Gropius (1945)
and Joseph Albers (1952), CIAM’s leadership among new generations of Cuban architects
was took on by Jose Luis Sert, advisor to the new Junta Nacional de Planificacion (JNP,
National Board of Planning) created in 1955 by Batista’s dictatorship.
Having arrived from the late 1940s in Venezuela, but especially during Perez Jimenez’s
dictatorship (1952–1958), planning was advocated by Sert himself, Robert Moses, Francis
Violich and Rotival again, all of them advisors of the Comision Nacional de Urbanismo
(CNU, National Commission of Planning). The French visitor left testimonies of the rise of the
new planning technique in the post-war years. Hired for second time by the Venezuelan
government,10 Rotival (1964) did not wish to be considered any longer as urbaniste, but as
10 Let us remember that Rotival’s previous stay had been during the late 1930s, for the first plan of Caracas.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–12398
representative of the more-comprehensive professional that the planificateurwas supposed to
be, according to a differentiation that he would theorize about some years later (Almandoz,
1997: 314–315). In the case of Violich, his Cities of Latin America had offered, as we already
know, one of the first comparative perspectives of the Europeanized and academic
backgrounds in several professional milieus he was in contact with throughout his journey.
But it must be pointed out that in that early book the Californian planner had noticed that
‘younger practising architects and planners’ started to ‘look towards the United States rather
than to Europe’ (Violich, 1944: 158, 169, 173). Violich later summarized, in relation to the
Venezuelan experience, the disciplinary shift that had taken place in those decades, what can
be generalized to most of the continent: ‘A latter-day Beaux Arts movement inspired the late
1930s, and a social orientation, the mid-1940s, only to give way in the early 1950s to a
functional approach drawing on North American techniques’ (Violich, 1975: 285).
In the case of Brazil, after the Russian Gregori Warchavchik’s introduction of
international modernism to Sao Paulo since 1923, the presence of CIAM representatives
and Le Corbusier’s proposals for Rio fuelled the functionalist momentum that would reach
its peak in Costa’s and Niemeyer’s Brasilia. At the same time, in the midst of the boosting
of local governments by the new 1946 constitution, the recently-created Brazilian
Association of Municipalities celebrated its first congress in 1950 (Pereira, 2003: 81). The
transition from urbanismo to planejamento was sped up by father Joseph Lebret’s visits to
Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities, where he advocated the principles and variables of
regional and economic planning as a new technique to deal with the sprawl of metropolitan
areas (Lamparelli, 1995; Leme, 1999: 26). The awareness of new approaches to regional
planning in the professional milieu was evinced in the criticisms against the Brasilia plan,
for not having incorporated more economists, ecologists, and social scientists, as it was
spelt out by the historian Gilberto Freyre, a leading voice of Brazil’s social sciences.
Costa’s reply was not only clever but also representative of a turning point of the
discipline: the new capital city was not supposed to be ‘the outcome but the cause of a
regional plan’ (Fraser, 2000: 230).
It is not a coincidence that the use of the term urbanismo during the first decades of the
20th century in Latin America was replaced after the second world war by planificacion or
planeamiento in Spanish, and by planejamento in Portuguese. Since, they often appear
intermingled as mere synonyms, the seeming duplicity can be attributed to a vocabulary
that, in this case, is richer in Spanish and Portuguese than in English. In the latter,
urbanism did not use to have a disciplinary connotation alternative to British town
planning or American urban planning—a situation that would only change in the post-
modern era. But there actually are conceptual and historical nuances associated to each
term: as it has been outlined for industrialized countries, unlike French urbanisme, Italian
urbanistica and German Stadtebau, Anglo-Saxon town planning stressed systemic,
procedural and/or political values, relying for that purpose on social sciences and its
technical apparatus instead of design, just to thus sum up the most widespread orientation
that planning had by the mid-20th century (Piccinato, 1987; Taylor, 1998; Hebbert, 2004).
While involving some meanings of that construct, Latin America’s transition from
urbanismo into planificacion coincided with the takeover of the poles from which
technical modernity was imported. As it had happened in the domains of medicine and
engineering, among others, the academic urbanism that had mainly arrived from Europe
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 99
until the late 1930s, was to give way to a package of master plans, zoning ordinances and
planning-related instruments and institutions copied from the USA (Almandoz, 2002:
31–39).11 Mainly transferred to Latin America by the European maestros exiled in
Harvard and MIT, Yale and Berkeley, CIAM’s functionalism became the mainstream
where diverse methodological influences of planning were incorporated to. Ranging from
economic and social variables to regional and systemic approaches, all of them were added
in heterodox combinations to Latin America’s national platforms of functionalist
planificacion and planejamento. If there had been some Taylorist functionalism as
underlying rationality at the crystallization of urbanismo from the 1930s in countries like
Argentina and Brazil (Outtes, 1997: 18), it was during the post-war developmentalism
when a more procedural and technocratic functionalism fuelled the transition to planning
and the definitive adoption of zoning, which spread throughout most the continent by the
1960s. The more technocratic climate that accompanied planning would also shape a more
specialized relationship with urban studies and history as an specific component, as we
shall see in Chapter 4.
The distinctions involved in Latin America’s transition from urbanismo into planificacion
were recognized, from a more theoretical than historical perspective, by Emilio Harth-Terre
and Patricio Randle, who participated in that metamorphosis of the emerging discipline and
could therefore look at it with hindsight. In hisFilosofıa en el urbanismo (1961, Fig. 8), Harth-
Terre declared himself to be in favour of this term that corresponded to the ‘science of the
city’, whereas the ‘overrating of the word planificacion’, as a consequence of the growing
admiration for the Anglo-Saxon world in Latin American universities, would have led to the
‘degenerating sequel of planeamiento urbano as neologism’, which unnecessarily replaced
‘very pure and expressive’ word urbanismo.
Notwithstanding his foreign name, Harth-Terre claimed the Castilian origin of the word
back to Ildefonso Cerda’s La teorıa de la urbanizacion y aplicacion de los principios y
doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona (1867)—which would have preceded the
alleged coining of the term for Romance languages in Poete’s work. Having been adopted
more via North America’s city planning than through Britain’s town planning,
planeamiento urbano ended up being, according to the Peruvian architect, an ‘unnecessary
periphrasis’ that would only be acceptable if the preeminence of urbanismo was
recognized as the science of the city, whereas planning was regarded as its technique. In
fact, Harth-Terre’s work can be understood in itself as a theoretical contribution to the
scientific status of the discipline—a task for which the author regarded the architect as
primus inter pares (Harth-Terre, 1961: 64, 124–126).
Some years later, on the assumption that in Spanish both terms were acceptable, in his
book Que es el urbanismo (1968, Fig. 9), Randle did not regard them, though, as
synonyms, attributing rather a historical and conceptual meaning to each word. Because of
being the heirs of so many influences, Latin Americans would have adopted urbanismo
since ‘the trends that had led the rise of this activity were French’; planeamiento urbano,
instead, would have prevailed after the second world war throughout the ‘English
influence’, by which the Argentine professor probably meant the Anglo-Saxon influx that
11 Once again I rely on this review, where more specific bibliography can be found.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123100
arrived to Latin America via the US. But Randle went beyond the mere succession of
words and decided to tackle the ‘Byzantine distinction’ that intrigued him, daring to put
forward the following differentiation between urbanismo and planeamiento urbano:
.they are two diverse and consecutive concepts whose starting point would be the
urbanismo in its acceptation closest to the building aesthetic, to the urban public
work and to the provision of public services, according to the first treatises of the late
19th century and the beginning of the twentieth. After that, instead, while the theory
and practice were perfected, planeamiento urbano would arise as a new task, in
which the aesthetical side would be a consequence of more comprehensive and
scientific concerns, such as land use and circulation. (Randle, 1968: 22).12
The books of Randle and Harth-Terre managed to set in theoretical perspective what
seemed to be a fashion that replaced urbanismo by planificacion in Latin America, but
actually mirrored more structural changes of the discipline. As Harth-Terre emphasized, if
the terminological mutation had certainly to do with the order of appearance and diffusion
of the words in Spanish and Portuguese, it corresponded at the same time to a displacement
of the poles from which technical modernity was imported in post-war Latin America,
from Europe to the United States. On a more practical level, that shift represented, as
Randle pointed out, a replacement of the building aesthetic of early-20th-century projects
by a more comprehensive and functional conception of the planes produced by local and
national offices of planning. From the Mexico that gave refuge to Meyer to the Argentina
that boasted the first edition of the Carta de Atenas—almost two decades earlier than The
Athens Charter (1973) appeared in English—several of those offices advocated concepts
and instruments transferred by CIAM-related advisers, as Sert did in Caracas and Havana.
So, as it had happened with Beaux-Arts academicism during the emergence of the
discipline in the 1930s, functionalist modernism framed the platform on which the
transition from urbanismo to planificacion was built up in post-war Latin America.
3.3. The historical agenda of the Latin American city
Since the 1940s, the teaching of history in some of Latin America’s universities could
be differentiated only when architectural schools managed to overcome the 19th-century
dichotomy, rooted in the Bourbon reforms of the late Colonial period, between the artistic
precepts of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the engineering of the Ecole Polytechnique’s
(Torre, 2002: 549–551). As to the incipient teaching of urbanism, the transition towards
planificacion seemed to be initially accompanied by the institutionalization of history as
an instrumental component aimed at enriching the professional practice, especially in
Argentina’s mature milieu. In this respect we must remember the visit of Poete, invited by
12 My translation of: ‘.se tratarıa de dos conceptos diversos y sucesivos teniendo como punto de partida el
urbanismo en su aceptacion mas proxima a la estetica edilicia, a la obra publica urbana y a la provision de
servicios urbanos, conforme a los primeros tratados de fines del siglo anterior y comienzos de este. Luego, en
cambio, a la vez que se perfecciona la teorıa y la practica, surgirıa como una nueva tarea la del planeamiento
urbano, en la que el lado estetico era solo una consecuencia de otras preocupaciones mas integrales y cientıficas
tales como el uso del suelo y la circulacion’.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 101
his disciple della Paolera, for launching the UBA’s ‘Curso Superior de Urbanismo’
(Advanced Course of Planning), which was still influenced by the evolutionist orientation
of the Parisian Institut d’Urbanisme. This link between history and practice was
accompanied, in Argentina’s public administration, by a more sector-structured approach
to the ‘evolution of city’, supposed to provide inputs for regional plans, according to the
guidelines introduced in those years by the Division of Urban Information belonging to the
General Direction of Public Works and Urban Planning (DGOPU) (Novick, 2003: 12).
A pioneer of Latin America’s urban historical agenda that was about to crystallize,
Jorge E. Hardoy witnessed the unfocused approach of that exhausted evolutionism, still
associated with an old-fashioned urbanism that was no longer able to meet the
requirements of the emerging planning. According to his later testimony, the contents of
the 1940s syllabuses did not facilitate either the understanding of the city’s evolution or
the historic centres that underwent rapid expansion and overcrowding; it somehow
happened as with the urbanismo that was practised by then: even though there were
interventions inspired on modern functionalism, the renewal plans often remained stuck to
partial approaches to traffic, green areas or embellishment, without incorporating
economic, social and environmental dimensions that already accompanied technical
planning in Europe and North America (Hardoy, 1991: 143).
The evolutionist emphasis was replaced in the following decade with the consolidation
of the planning culture and the differentiation of history as one of its components. By the
mid-1950s, the reform in the teaching of town planning, among other disciplines, became
an important reference at Argentina’s National University of Rosario (UNR), where della
Paolera had promoted the course on urbanism since 1929 (Randle, 1977: 12). The UNR
then invited outstanding professionals from Buenos Aires that were also interested in
architectural and urban historiography, such as Bullrich and Hardoy, whose courses were
attended by a younger generation of students, including Ramon Gutierrez and Roberto
Segre (Almandoz, 2003: 201–202). In spite of this relative advance, there seemed to be
still a shallow historical approach in the teaching of planning, what Gutierrez attributes to
the predominance of CIAM’s de-contextualized prospective.
‘By those years the teaching of town planning was dominated by the application of the
CIAM model. There was little room for discussing a historical view of the problem, and in
general urban plans incorporated aspects of historical evolution just as a cultural veneer
that did not influence the design of proposals or the generation of urban measures. It was
difficult to understand the possibility of formulating a future from history itself; it was
always more important the foreign model of ‘what had to be’ than understanding ‘what it
was’.(Almandoz, 2004: 244).13
If the aimless and almost decorative incorporation of urban history in the teaching and
practice of planning can be generalized to other countries up to the 1950s (Gutierrez, 1997;
13 My translation of: ‘La ensenanza del urbanismo en estos anos estaba dominada por la aplicacion del modelo del
CIAM. Habıa poco espacio para discutir una vision historica del problema, y en general los planes urbanos
incorporaban aspectos de la evolucion historica como un simple barniz cultural que no tenıa incidencia en
propuestas de diseno o en la gestacion de medidas urbanas. Era difıcil entender la posibilidad de formular un
futuro desde la propia historia; siempre pesaba mas el modelo externo de lo que ‘se debıa ser’ antes de entender
‘lo que se era’’.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123102
Torre, 2002), Latin America’s urban studies began to systematically analyze, in the
following decade, the historical, economic and sociological relationship among
industrialization, urbanization and modernization. These elements were applied to
determine a sort of ‘epochal equation’ aimed at transforming Weber’s Western modernity
into a regional modernization in the sense pointed out by Habermas (Gorelik, 2004: 33).
This vision of the city as a catalyst of social change was present in Philip M. Hauser’s
interpretation as editor of La urbanizacion en America Latina (Hauser, 1967, Fig. 10), a
book resulting from an international conference held in Santiago de Chile in July 1959,
under the patronage of UNESCO and the ECLA. Without including much historical
review, that book’s rather sociological interpretation would be influential not only for later
publications that adopted its functionalist approach—such as the already-quoted Harris’s
The Growth of Latin American Cities (1971, Fig. 11)—but also in terms of the critical
reaction that prompted, which would be led by Jorge E. Hardoy.
Coming from the architectural field, the Argentine Jorge Hardoy (Fig. 12) stood out
from the 1960s as the continental groundbreaker of a more focused urban history of Latin
America, especially after his work Las ciudades precolombinas (1964) (Hardoy, 1973,
Fig. 13). Jointly with the Americans Richard Schaedel and Richard Morse,14 among
others, Hardoy organized symposia about regional urbanization in the context of the
International Congresses of Americanists (ICA): Mar del Plata (1966), Stuttgart (1968),
Lima (1970, Fig. 14), Rome (1972, Fig. 15), Mexico city (1974) and Paris (1976, Fig. 16).
The early ones dealt with Latin America’s urbanization in general and throughout different
historical periods, searching ‘to facilitate a wide exchange of ideas among archaeologists,
architects, anthropologists, social and art historians, as well as town planners’ (Schaedel
and Hardoy, 1975: 16). But after Lima’s ICA, a central issue was set for each meeting,
which reviewed the subject from the preColumbian to the contemporary times.
Also in terms of events, it is noteworthy that an International Seminar about the
‘Situation of the Historiography of Latin American Architecture’ was held in Caracas in
October 1967, at the Central University of Venezuela’s Centre of Historical and
Aesthetical Research (CIHE) (Fig. 17). Even though the event’s conclusions did not make
explicit the necessity of an urban agenda as such, the aim to go beyond the architectural
arena was perceivable in the wish for giving to historiography ‘an active character’ that
could incorporate it ‘operatively in the context of contemporary Latin American culture’,
as it was expressed by Gasparini (1968: 11–12), organizer of the event. Another figure of
international stature, Gaspirini was the director of the CIHE since its creation in 1963, a
centre that, especially through its bulletin (Fig. 18), carried out a fundamental task
comparable to Hardoy’s Centro de Estudios Urbanos (CEUR, Centre of Urban Studies) at
the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires.
Besides the CIHE and CEUR, there were other nuclei reckoned by Gutierrez as
fundamental for the field that was being contoured: the Grupo de Estudios Urbanos (GEU,
Group of Urban Studies), founded by Mariano Arana in Uruguay; the Oikos group,
14 Trained as an architect in Argentina, Hardoy received a PhD in city and regional planning from Harvard
University, what made him familiar with the North American academia and professional milieu. By the time of
these events and collective publications, Richard Morse was Professor at the Department of History, Yale
University; Richard Schaedel was Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 103
promoted by Patricio Randle in Argentina; the Catholic University of Chile’s Instituto de
Urbanismo (Institute of Urbanism), which edited the Eure journal and gathered Armando
de Ramon, Patricio Gros and Gabriel Guarda; the works of Paulo Santos and Nestor
Goulart Reis, junior, in Brazil, as well as those by Carlos Williams and Santiago Agurto in
Peru (Almandoz, 2004: 245).
In addition to the growing importance given by architectural journals to urban history,
the all-embracing perspective of colonial and republican periods was consolidated by the
1960s and 1970s in several compilations about Latin America’s urbanization. They were
edited in Spanish by Hardoy and Tobar (1969); Solano (1975, Fig. 19), as well as in
English by Hardoy (1975, Fig. 20), and Roberts (1978, Fig. 21). Among the multi-authored
books that contributed to inform the continent’s historiography, one of the most successful
resulted from the joint effort of experts on Latin American architecture, such as Bullrich,
Hardoy and Segre, among others that in 1967 had gathered in Lima under UNESCO’s
patronage, and in Buenos Aires two years later. With chapters addressing diverse urban
aspects such as the process of urbanization, the shaping of metropolitan areas and squatter
settlements, the transformation of the rural context and the emergence of new towns, the
book finally appeared under the not-very-representative title of America Latina en su
arquitectura (1975), edited by Segre (1983), with successive editions until the early 1980s
(Fig. 22).
The historical review of the ‘Latin American city’, a category that was built up and
delimitated in the 1960s, can thus be regarded as part of the political, economic and
cultural agenda set up for the region by ECLA and UNESCO (Gorelik, 2004: 33–34). In
consonance with a discipline that was shifting from urbanismo into planificacion, that
agenda was underpinned, on institutional grounds, with the constitution of the Sociedad
Interamericana de Planificacion (SIAP, Inter-American Society of Planning) and the
Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO, Latin American Council of
Social Sciences), which included a Commission for Urban and Regional Development.
Also sponsored by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, SIAP and CLACSO published
some of the above-referred compilations, which not only were a ‘required reading’ for a
new generation of scholars (Gutierrez, 1995: 7), but also finally materialized, as a
bibliographic corpus, the historical agenda of the Latin American city. If some of these
institutional changes were fuelled by the impulse of developmentalism and the general
quest for modernization, we must not forget, though, the role of Hardoy, Morse and
Gasparini, among other pioneers whose initiative and sense of opportunity led to focusing
on the historical field, using for that purpose the ICA and other international and
interdisciplinary conferences. In this respect prevailed the examples of the US, Britain and
Italy, where major events and international exchange had sealed the new field from the
early 1960s (Handlin and Burchard, 1967; Dyos, 1968; Zucconi, 2002)—not much earlier
than in Latin America after all.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123104
4
The dominance of dependence
4.1. The failure of modernization and the emergence of the SoD
Cuba’s 1959 revolution, which ousted Batista from power and installed the Marxist
regime led by Fidel Castro, prefigured Latin America’s political and economic climate in
the rest of the Cold War. In order to forestall further leftist revolutions, the Kennedy
administration decided to promote the so-called Alliance for Progress (AfP), a programme
aimed at consolidating the ISI, promoting land reform and reducing social inequalities
through US help to new democratic governments of the region. Beneficiaries included
Romulo Betancourt (1959–1964) in Venezuela; Arturo Frondizi (1958–1962) in
Argentina; Fernando Belaunde Terry (1963–1968) in Peru; Eduardo Frei (1964–1970)
in Chile; and, especially, Alberto Lleras Camargo (1958–1962) and Carlos Lleras
Restrepo (1966–1970) in Colombia (Williamson, 1992: 349).
In spite of the AfP aid and ISI’s long presence in biggest economies, by the late 1960s
industrialization had neither diversified nor consolidated in Latin America, especially in
terms of durable consumer goods and machinery. The weakness of economic integration
within the region, the small size of some of the national markets and the disadvantage of
most of the countries for competing with their manufacture in international circuits—
already flooded with produce made in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the rest of the far east—are
some of the factors argued to explain the ISI’s structural and contextual constrains. But
before its eventual failure, the ‘deepening’ of the ISI from light to ‘intermediate’
manufacture and heavy machinery, which had been tried throughout the 1960s, aggravated
the economic and social distortions of underdevelopment.
‘For deepening involved a qualitative change in production from the ‘easy’ phase of ISI,
involving labour-intensive, low-skilled, low-technology manufacturing to the ‘hard’ phase of
capital intensive, high-skilled, high-technology industries. The result was that the rising tide
offugitives from the crisis in the countryside could not be absorbed by industry in the cities, so
that during the 1960s urban unemployment began to soar’ (Williamson, 1992: 339–340).
Indeed, by the early 1970s it was already evident that, beyond the industrial bourgeoisie
and middle classes, the ‘modernizing style of development’ of the previous decades had
not spread its effects to other strata of population, especially to the growing mass of ‘urban
poverty’ which was fuelled by rural–urban migration (Clichevsky, 1990: 25). The failure
of economic growth, developmentalism and modernization were worsened, after 1973, by
the inflationary effects of the international oil crisis, which in Latin America were not only
caused by the soaring prices of fuels as such, but also by the unaffordable increase of the
machinery imported from the industrialized world. Fuelled by the penetration of socialism
and guerrillas, the economic and social malaise led some of Latin America’s most stable
democracies to embrace dictatorships or military juntas that would mark their evolution up
to the 1980s, as it was dramatically epitomized in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile (1973–1990).
The exhaustion of ISI thus fractured the fragile support that industrialization had provided
in the post-war decades to the urbanization process, whose level increased from 57.4% in 1970
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 105
to 65.4 in 1980 in Latin America altogether (Clichevsky, 1990: 42). Far above Africa and
Asia—which were still 28.7 and 26.6 by 1980, respectively–Latin America was the most
urbanized region of what, rather than ‘developing’, started to be known as the Third World
(Drakakis-Smith, 1990; Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 24–25).15 Throughout most of the
1970s, Latin America’s gross rates of urban growth were six times higher than the rural ones
(Clichevsky, 1990: 48), what indicated the massive flows arriving to cities from the
countryside. On top of that, most this population was highly concentrated in national
territories: not only Latin America boasted three of the Third World’s five megalopolis above
8 million by 1970 (Clark, 2000: 46), but more than a half of the national populations of
Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile and Colombia lived in metropolitan areas above
100 000 inhabitants by 1980 (Clichevsky, 1990: 54).
From the 1970s Latin America thus exhibited the most dramatic effects of hyper-
urbanization, such as the hypertrophy of the tertiary sector and informal economy that
camouflaged surplus of urban labour force, completed with the proliferation of squatter
settlements and poverty. The failure of developmentalism and modernization and the
ensuing syndrome of Third World urbanization challenged ECLA’s functionalist approach
in social sciences that had prevailed in Latin America up to the 1960s.
Partly conceived as an alternative to the liberal doctrine of comparative advantage, which
had traditionally explained Latin America’s historical sluggishness within the world economy
since the late colonial period,16 the theory of Dependence reinterpreted the centre/periphery
antinomy as a structural hindrance that could only be overcome on the basis of the state’s
public intervention, similar to USA’s Keynesianism (Williamson, 1998: 334–335). In this
respect the Dependence approach was not originally opposed to ECLA’s initiatives, including
the ISI; but insofar as the latter proved to be exhausted, the dependentismo became a
predominantly Marxist response to capitalist developmentalism.17 With later contributions by
Brazil’s Celso Furtado, Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, among others, the theory
turned into a Marxist school of social sciences, providing a historical matrix aimed at
understanding Latin America’s backwardness during the colonial and republican eras,
including the economic, political and social dimensions of underdevelopment (Palma, 1978).
Marking Latin America’s intellectual climate in the Cold War era, the School of Dependence
(SoD) would remain highly influential in different domains and countries until the early 1980s.
4.2. Loosing spatiality
The structural problems of the so-called ‘dependent urbanization’ throughout the 20th
century were described and analyzed by Castells in Imperialismo y urbanizacion en
15 The Third World syndrome has been summed up in the following terms (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 12): ‘As
health and social welfare standards are generally so much better in the cities than in the rural areas, Third World cities
exemplify par excellence the combination of preindustrial fertility with post-industrial mortality. Contemporary cities
in the developing world exhibit some of the highest rates of natural increase ever found in cities’.16 An excellent example of the application of the doctrine of comparative advantage for the both North and Latin
America in the 19 century was made by Morse (1975).17 I acknowledge again the valuable distinction established by one of the readers of the first version of this article
submitted to Planning in Process.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123106
America Latina (1973, Fig. 23), and by Schteingart in Urbanizacion y dependencia en
America Latina (1973). The social and political aspects of the region’s cities as dramatic
stages of that urbanization were meanwhile typified by Kaplan (1972); Quijano (1977),
among others. A historical analysis of the continental and national networks of cities was
carried out by Rofman (1977) in Dependencia, estructura de poder y formacion regional
en America Latina (Fig. 24)—one of the few attempts to render more geographical the
SoD’s rather structural discourse.
Without seeking a properly historical perspective, another territorial and even spatial
approach was tried by Segre in Las estructuras ambientales de America Latina (1977,
Fig. 25). Beyond his abundant architectural production, in the domain of urban studies,
Segre’s Marxist background was influenced by Lefebvre’s Le droit a la ville (1974) and
Fernando de Ramon’s La ideologıa urbanıstica (1970), as well as by Gino Germani’s
structural courses which he had attended in Buenos Aires, besides his own teaching at
Havana’s Jose Antonio Echeverrıa Polytechnic Institute (ISPJAE).18 Following a Marxist
rationale for different case studies, Segre reviewed some of the continent’s territorial and
spatial problems in different scales: from the weakness of urban networks inherited from
the Colony to the contemporary threats to historic centres in the middle of modernizing
cities, all of which issues were set against the background of capitalist interests in Latin
America (Segre, 1977). In spite of its historical limitations and voids, that book entered the
spatial and territorial arena, unlike other SoD representatives—Martha Schteingart, Emilio
Pradilla Cobos, Fernando Carrion, Raquel Rolnik, Paul Singer and Oswaldo Sunkel—that
influenced his work, according to Segre’s own recognition (Almandoz, 2003b: 204).
Besides the lack of spatial and territorial projection, the oblivion of cultural aspects was
another weakness of the SoD—though it would be more than compensated by Jose Luis
Romero’s classic Latinoamerica: las ciudades y las ideas (1976, Fig. 26). Even though the
Argentine scholar assumed the ‘heteronomous’ and ideological development of the Creole
capital cities as platforms of an imported modernity, his pioneering history of ideas
managed to escape from Marxist principles and the economy-bound agenda of the school
(Romero, 1984: 19–20).
In addition to the fact that not all the symptoms of Latin America’s dependent
urbanization equally caught the SoD’s interest, its approach was somehow ‘ahistorical’, as
it has often happened with social scientists dealing with the Third World urbanization
(Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 28). From the perspective of historiography, the SoD
authors offered in many cases ‘interpretations’ more than ‘studies grounded on a careful
exploration of the sources’ (Guerra, 1989: 605). In this respect, the history ‘from below’
advocated by the Dependence studies favoured the demographic and economic
urbanization over the city and its urban fabric (Novick, 2003: 14). This is why one
could say that Soja’s (1995) thesis—according to which the Marxist critique reinstated
space in social theory in the case of ‘post-structuralist’ geography—is not applicable to the
SoD’s economic-oriented analyses, which rather contributed to the loss of spatiality of
Latin America’s urban planning historiography.
18 Having studied architecture at the UBA, Segre settled in Cuba since 1963, where he taught at the ISPJAE and
the Faculty of Arts of Havana’s University.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 107
By contrast to the SoD’s structuralism, Randle’s interesting interpretation of urban
historiography in Evolucion urbanıstica (1972, Fig. 27) reminded—as a rare example of the
above-referred morphology and evolutionism that had underpinned the field in Latin
America—the influence of French historians and urbanists such as Lavedan, Poete and
Bardet, combined with the organicism of Geddes and Mumford. Different from the biological
and social evolutionism of Darwin and Spencer, Randle’s urban planning evolution claimed to
be a category more specific than the urban historical geography or than the town or planning
history: it ought to ‘prevent the lack of spatiality that often leads to clashing with other
historical approaches’, while allowing ‘an elaboration or processing of historical data with its
own method and aim’ (Randle, 1972: 13–14). These methods ranged from Spengler’s
historical and cultural morphology to the elaboration of ‘time sections’ after the model of
Geddes’s surveys. All of those ingredients were gathered by the leader of the Oikos group in
the intuitive and organic notion of evolucion urbanıstica, whose differentiation regarding
other theoretical orientations was established in the following terms:
Evolution, elan vital, chance, here they are three keywords semantically intertwined
in a complex way. It is the answer to positivism, to 19th-century materialism, to
Darwinian mechanism. And this is the epoch when, without the name of town
planning evolution or without any name, the discipline that was to be proposed and
developed by a handful of scholars with different backgrounds was conceived. The
concern of those scholars for finding clues, remains of regularity, basic norms of
the city life do not take them to fall into a simplistic and anticultural pragmatism; on
the contrary, that concern leads them to choosing the term evolution, which they use
one time and another to imply the vital contents so well presented by Bergson’s
philosophy (Randle, 1972: 19–20).19
Often used in urban studies that served as introductions to plans in Argentina since the
early 20th century, this evolutionist view had certainly lasted in university courses that
Randle’s book is representative of.20 However, as it has been pointed out by Novick in
order to contextualize it, such evolutionism looked ‘still anchored in the ideas of the
genetic urbanism from which discusses with Marxist urban sociology that dominated
Argentina’s intellectual field of the 1970s’. This is why the fact that Randle’s emphasis on
physical and professional dimensions ended up approaching the principles of the operative
history and anticipating those of the urban architecture of the 1980s, has been played down
19 My translation of: ‘Evolucion, elan vital, azar, he aquı tres palabras claves enlazadas semanticamente de una
manera compleja. Es la respuesta al positivismo, al materialismo decimononico, al mecanicismo darwinista. Y es la
epoca en que se gesta esta disciplina que sin el nombre de evolucion urbanıstica, o sin nombre alguno, va a ser
propuesta y desarrollada por un punado de estudiosos de la mas variada procedencia. Para estos estudiosos, la
preocupacion por encontrar pistas, vestigios de regularidad, normas basicas en la vida de las ciudades no los lleva a
caer en un pragmatismo simplista y anticultural, sino que, por el contrario, les hace escoger el termino evolucion que
emplean una y otra vez implicando esos contenidos vitales tan bien expuestos en toda la filosofıa bergsoniana’.20 Evolutionist reviews of the origins of urbanism were included in the already-mentioned treatises of the
discipline published in the 1960s by Harth-Terre and Randle. If the former’s Filosofıa en el urbanismo focused on
drawing the epistemology of urbanism from preceding disciplines, what led him to a more philosophical than
historical report, the latter’s Que es el urbanismo went beyond the review, in order to establish his own historical
search and typology, both in urban and planning terms.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123108
as involuntary and paradoxical (Novick, 2003: 14–15). Albeit it may be contested that
Randle’s clairvoyance was an ensuing consequence of his meaningful role as a rare
survivor of early-20th-century evolutionism and morphology (Fig. 28).
It remains true anyway that, beyond Argentina, where one of its most productive nuclei
could be found, the SoD’s Marxist structuralism pervaded Latin America’s social sciences
in general and urban studies in particular. In addition to the SoD authors referred above,
the dominance of the Dependence approach is traceable not only in many of the SIAP and
CLACSO publications, but also in some others by pioneers of urban historiography
(Hardoy, 1975; Morse, 1975a; Roberts, 1978). As it had occurred with developmentalism
and modernization on economic and social arena, the SoD defeated the evolutionism and
morphology of the studies coming from history of art and geography. There was thus
established a clear dominance in an urban historiography highly economic and
sociological, which in great deal obliterated its spatial references, as it happened with
the practice of planificacion itself.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 109
5
Morphological revival
5.1. The lost decade and neo-liberalism
The failure of ISI, the 1970s oil crisis and the ensuing hyperinflation aggravated an
endemic problem that has menaced Latin American republics ever since political
independence: the foreign debt. Economic unrest of the last decades made most of the
republics increase their loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Bank (WB) and other multilateral agencies, so that Latin America’s foreign debt rose from
US$ 352 183 millions in 1983 to 401 360 in 1988. Meanwhile, rates of economic growth
not only were contracted but also became negative during the same period (Clichevsky,
1990: 29), even for the case of Venezuela and other oil-exporting countries, which had
endured minor degrees of inflation and indebtedness. Only Jamaica, Colombia and Chile
avoided a general decline in per capita income (United Nations, 1996: 45). This is why the
1980s was dubbed by ECLA as Latin America’s ‘lost decade’, especially by contrast with
the astounding development achieved by the Asian ‘tigers’—South Korea, Singapore
Malaysia, Thailand—as well as Spain and other new members of the former European
Community (EC).
Latin America’s increasing dependence on financial agencies entitled the IMF and
WB to progressively dictate economic and social recipes to be adopted. Marked by
the New Right of the Anglo-American axis, the ‘plans of adjustments’ prescribed
from 1982 were in fact packages of neo-liberal policies, including reductions of the
huge bureaucracies and privatization of many services and companies of Latin
America’s corporate states. With the direct advice of Milton Friedman and the school
of ‘Chicago boys’, Pinochet’s Chile was an early success that demonstrated how
reforms could be undertaken under authoritarian regimes—as it had somehow been
the case of South Korea and Franco’s Spain in the last years. The neo-liberal package
was applicable yet unstable in the long term, in the cases of C. Salinas de Gortari
(1988–1994) in Mexico and Carlos Menem in Argentina (1989–1995, 1995–1999),
especially during his first term. But reforms required by the IMF and WB proved to
be disastrous when they were applied too late and drastically after a period of relative
bonanza, as it happened during the second government of Carlos A. Perez in
Venezuela (1989–1993), marked by riots, social unrest and military coups.
Venezuela’s climate of political and social violence was exported to other Latin
American countries where, worsened by financial cracks in the mid-1990s, neo-liberal
adjustments did not manage to diminish social inequities but rather increased poverty
and criminality by the end of the decade (Rotker, 2000).
With 71.4% of its population living in urban settlements by 1990, Latin America
completed the cycle of urbanization in the midst of neo-liberalism that tried to palliate the
recession of the lost decade. Slower population growth was prompted by lower fertility
and less rural–urban immigration, what resulted in ‘smaller increases in the levels of
urbanization and the much smaller rates of growth for many of the region’s larger cities’
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123110
(United Nations, 1996: 42–43).21 The completion of the cycle of urbanization in most of
the countries must not be mistaken, though, for the correction of the territorial unbalances
or economic distortions. An indicator of Latin America’s excessive urban concentration is
that, with 29% by 1990, there were more people living in ‘million-cities’ than living in
rural areas (United Nations, 1996: 47–48).
The stronger attraction of ‘million-cities’ over major metropolises was caused by the
latter’s exhaustion in terms of worn-out infrastructure and deterioration of the living
standards, what in turn led to a shift from rural–urban to inter-urban migration
(Clichevsky, 1990: 47). Medium-size cities of some of the region’s most urbanized
countries were favoured by this turn, especially in the case of professionals of the middle
classes looking for affordable housing and other services. Although the relative loss of
concentration can be regarded as a positive effect of the completion of the cycle of
urbanization, that mobility has actually mirrored desperate middle classes impoverished
by the decrease of the per capita income and even the cut of real wages.
Partly as a consequence of the loss of industrial jobs and the cuts in public bureaucracy
recommended by liberal reforms, urban unemployment and informal sector increased in
all countries (United Nations, 1996: 46). The diversification of informal economy and the
aggravation of poverty have had dramatic effects in the urban scene, especially in terms of
the invasion of the public space by street vendors and the establishment of gated
communities in both residential districts and shanty towns. The segregation of the dual
city, has been accompanied by the deterioration of infrastructure and the general increase
of urban poverty, which by 1990 amounted to 40% of the population in Colombia, 38 in
Brazil, 28 in Venezuela and 23 in Mexico, among some of Latin America’s most advanced
countries (United Nations, 1996: 528). Criminality, social unrest and lack of governance
thereafter remained as national problems whose most dramatic stages have been
metropolitan areas under the pressure of conflicting groups (Villasante, 1994; Rotker,
2000). Not a very promising agenda for a continent that has completed its urbanization
after more than a century.
5.2. The resurface of space and territory
Latin America’s malaise after the failure of developmental modernization seemed to be
repeated during the lost decade regarding the fall of the Marxist utopia. The penetration of
neo-liberal recipes was eased by the inefficiency of centralized systems of planning, whose
21 It is convenient to finally differentiate this general panorama according to the countries’ level of urbanization
by the mid-1990s (United Nations, 1996: 48): ‘Although the accuracy of comparisons between countries in their
level of urbanization are always limited by the differences in the criteria used to define urban centres, it is possible
to identify three groups of nations. The first, the most urbanized with more than 80% of their population living in
urban areas includes the three nations in the Southern Cone and Venezuela. The second with between 50 and 80%
in urban areas includes most of the countries that had rapid and industrial development during the period 1950–
1990—Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia—and also Cuba (that was already one of the
most urbanized nations in the region in 1950), Bolivia, Peru and Nicaragua and Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.
The third with less than 50% of the population in urban areas includes only one in South America (Paraguay) and
one in the Caribbean (Haiti) along with a group of countries in Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador,
Guatemala and Honduras).’.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 111
theorists had often nurtured from the SoD’s structural critique of the social and economic
inequities of capitalism, without putting forward feasible alternatives of development.
After a reaction ‘against the too Dependence-oriented analyses’ that also happened in
other fields of Latin America’s economic and social history (Mauro, 1989: 641), most of
that Marxist rationality would be also rejected as a historical explanation throughout the
1980s, though some of the SoD’s urban statements would resurface in later approaches,
reinterpreted from diverse perspectives and contexts. The SoD’s historical exhaustion ran
parallel to the re-emergence of space and territory in disciplines dealing with the Latin
American city.
The resurface of historical spatiality had been announced in different ways. On the one
hand, as it happened in other regions of the world, the awareness of the importance of the
cultural heritage encouraged, especially from the 1970s, the teaching of architectural
history in Latin America’s academic milieus. In this respect, Quito’s 1977 colloquium was
a landmark for the concern about historic centres, a subject that had already been
introduced in the Netherlands’ 1956 CIAM. A first generation of traditional centres
recuperated in the region since the 1950s included Brazil’s Salvador de Bahia, Colombia’s
Cartagena, Panama City and San Juan de Puerto Rico, Antigua, Ecuador’s Quito and
Mexico’s Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Taxco and San Miguel Allende. By the late 1970s Latin
America boasted 32 of the 164 centres declared as UNESCO’s Cultural Heritage of
Humanity (Gonzalez, 2002b: 158, 175, 199). In the professional practice, that concern
helped ‘to integrate the historical processes to the formulation of urban proposals’—a task
in which the stance of a renown planner as Hardoy in favour of historic centres played was
fundamental, as Gutierrez recognized (Almandoz, 2004: 244). In the academia, the
conservacion of the centres must be regarded as a factor that highlighted history as a
framework for the teaching of theory and criticism, a situation that can still be found in
some of Latin America’s architectural schools (Torre, 2002: 549, 551). In this context also
characterized by the last stages of the SoD coming from social sciences, the appearance of
books and treatises that departed from and took on the region’s peculiarities was another
factor that announced the maturity of Latin America’s planning history and its progressive
differentiation from architectural historiography.
As an antecedent worth mentioning, from the 1960s Marina Waisman (Fig. 29) had
edited the series of Cuadernos Summa Nueva Vision, which aimed at serving as an
alternative to the predominance of foreign classics in Latin America’s architectural
schools (Torre, 2002: 554, 557). Her best known book, La estructura historica del entorno
(1972), cannot be considered a work of urbanism, not even of architectural history in the
traditional sense. However, in her attempt to establish a new epistemology for the
architecture of the industrial era, relying for that purpose on the discursive-formation
method similar to the one unfolded in Foucault’s L’archeologie du savoir (1969), the
Argentine professor updated and enlarged the concept of entorno (environment) as
‘cultural unity’ (Waisman, 1972: 47), in such a way that opened and strengthened links
with the city and its planning.
In this respect, Waisman’s influential interpretation—which had great impact among a
generation of architectural historians and critics in Argentina and Latin America in
general—advocated that historical research was supported ‘rather by structural
relationships’ among the objects than by its focus on the objects as such. Furthermore,
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123112
within this sort of vectorial complex of the cultural field of architecture, the ‘relations of
the work with the environment’ were recognized as one of architecture’s traditional issues
of ‘historical studies’ (Waisman, 1972: 43, 59; 1990). Even though Waisman’s book did
not identify an explicit link with the city and planning, both of them can be said to be
encompassed in her notion of entorno, in as much as the study of the historical relationship
with the urban components of that environment is recognized as belonging to the
architecture’s epistemology.
The appearance of treatises written by Latin American scholars also contributed to
regain spatiality and consolidate the peculiarity of planning historiography. If we look for
general histories of the discipline, it was Roberto Segre (Fig. 30) who undertook the
difficult task—the sole attempt in Latin America, as far as I know—of reconstructing the
emergence of urbanismo during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the context of
developed countries. This was partly due to the fact that he taught at the faculty of
architecture of the Havana University, where, understandably, a lot of effort was invested
in building up an alternative history of Western architecture, different from the allegedly
capitalist-oriented interpretation of traditional authors.
Segre’s titanic effort was materialized in Historia de la arquitectura y del urbanismo.
Paıses desarrollados. Siglos XIX y XX (1985, Fig. 31). On the basis of the ‘main
interpretative stock of the Modern Movement’, where he grouped planning historians such
as Benevolo (1968, 1974), Sica (1976–1978); Ragon (1991), and especially in the latter’s
way, Segre combined today’s blurred blocs of socialist and capitalist countries, putting
them in relation with a well-balanced matrix of architecture and urbanism, though
recognizing the primacy given to ‘aesthetic and symbolic values’ of architecture (Segre,
1985: 13–17).22 All this Marxist vision was completed by Segre with a historical
conception that distanced itself from the nostalgic and evasive catalogue of forms and
styles throughout which post-modernism had begun to register the past since the
late 1970s. More profound and contextualized was intended to be the ‘operative use of
history’ claimed by the author in the 1984 preface to the edition of his work in Spain
(Segre, 1985: 15).
Even though the ideological ingredients of that book were too strong, and in spite of its
‘triumphalism regarding the development of socialist countries’, both of which the author
recognized as weaknesses in a recent interview (Almandoz, 2003b: 204), I still believe that
one of the book’s contributions was to treat in detail the urban structures of the Soviet
countries after the second world war, a subject scarcely addressed in European and North
American texts. For the rest, considering that the Dependence approach had hitherto been
22 Understanding the forms of social space as results of ‘the correlation between (material and spiritual) necessity
and (economic, technical, aesthetical, etc.) possibility’, Segre opposed ‘the universal standards about the
aesthetical validity of achievements when studied without concrete references to societies where they are
formulated, namely the social classes, whether the latter are usufructuaries or not of spaces and buildings’. My
translation drawn from: ‘la primacıa otorgada a los valores esteticos y simbolicos de la arquitectura, cuyo
desarrollo evolutivo mantiene cierta autonomıa respecto a los factores estructurales del contexto historico’.‘la
correlacion existente entre necesidad (material y espiritual) y posibilidad (economica, tecnica, estetica,
etc.)’.‘los patrones universales sobre la validez estetica de las realizaciones estudiadas sin las referencias
concretas a la sociedad que las formula, o sea, a las clases sociales, usufructuarias o no de espacios o edificios’.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 113
linked to the above-referred studies on the urbanization process (Castells, 1973; Rofman,
1977) or the historical role of the cities (Kaplan, 1972; Quijano, 1977), it is worth saying
again that Segre was one of the few researchers that made the SoD’s last echoes resound in
the space and territory of planning history. However, it was a sort of belated epilogue, not
only because of the exhaustion of the Dependence-oriented analyses by the early 1980s,
but also because of the blurred limits between the capitalist and Soviet blocs after 1989.
As to the general histories of Latin America’s town planning, besides Hardoy’s
chapters in the collective works that he edited with his North American counterparts
(Schaedel and Hardoy, 1975; Hardoy et al., 1978), Segre’s books and Ramon Gutierrez’s
Arquitectura y urbanismo en Iberoamerica (1983, Fig. 32) stand out as the great treatises
produced within the region. In both of them, the novel historiography of urbanism is
alternated with the more-established periods of architectural history. As in Segre’s above-
referred works, completed with the compilation Historia de la arquitectura y el
urbanismo: America Latina y Cuba (Segre and others, 1986), in Gutierrez’s erudite treaty
some chapters of urban history were included, which ‘constituted the essential reference
for understanding the architectural phenomenon’. But beyond this sort of complementary
role, those chapters provided an entity of its own to Latin America’s planning
historiography, in terms of the book’s chronological and geographical structure, which
was completed by some functional subjects. Even though in the introduction to his book
Gutierrez acknowledged, like Segre, the existence of a ‘cultural dependence’ that would
be at the basis of many artistic, architectural and planning manifestations of Latin America
as a traditional periphery of the Western civilization that has become part of the
contemporary Third World, he argued that the answers to its necessities would come up,
‘more than from ideological recipes, from the thorough and specific understanding of its
own and unexplored realities’ (Gutierrez, 1984: 11–12).
Gutierrez (Fig. 33) is a perfect example of a scholar whose work moved from an art
history tradition to that of urban planning studies. He himself acknowledged being
influenced by both Bonet and Hardoy in these respective disciplines. This was made
possible by a formidable education that included, from its early stages, graduate studies in
the sociology programme coordinated by Gino Germani, housing and town planning
courses at the UBA, as well as Lebret’s lectures mentioned above, among other
ingredients. At the same time, in order to understand the vast scope of Gutierrez’s work,
there must be taken into account three geographic moves that entailed epistemological
shifts. Firstly, leaving Buenos Aires after Juan C. Onganıa’s 1966 coup d’etat, he settled in
Argentina’s remote northeast province, where his ‘focus of interest’ and ‘academic
perspectives’ changed; as Gutierrez summarized: ‘From there the task of architectural
history was projected into the urban with a logic more harmonious and less determined by
the architecture’s “monumental episodes”’ (Almandoz, 2004: 248).23 During the 1970s,
under the influence of Eduardo Ellis’s design workshop and Gordon Cullen’s readings,
Gutierrez trips throughout the Spanish countryside led him to revaluating vernacular
architecture and rural landscape.
23 My translation of: ‘Desde allı la tarea de la historia de la arquitectura se proyecto a lo urbano con una logica
mas armoniosa y menos tenida de la fuerza de los episodios ‘monumentales’ de la arquitectura’.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123114
At my return I regarded with different eyes and praised the small towns, the
relationships with landscape, the spatial quality of popular architecture, the simplicity
of solutions and the experience of community spaces. The environmental relation took a
leading role and all that helped to dismantle an education based on encyclopaedic
proposals and the ‘absolute’ truths of the modern movement (Almandoz, 2004: 248).24
Working for UNESCO between 1974 and 1977 in a programme for recuperating the
heritage and directing graduate courses, the years in Peru’s Cuzco helped Gutierrez ‘to
understand a profound America that questioned the senses of time, the efficiency and other
deep-rooted premises’, what made him glance ‘more intensely and farther’, according to his
own testimony (Almandoz, 2004: 248). As in the case of Segre, though from a different
epistemological stance, geographic displacements and the question of conservacion of historic
centres—also present in Hardoy in terms of urban history and in Waisman through the
typology that those centres epitomize—seemed to have led Gutierrez to reach an
intercontinental perspective. Thus, in the last stages of both the SoD’s loss of spatiality that
had pervaded Latin America’s social sciences and the CIAM’s functionalist utopia in the
professional practice, in the regional treatises of these authors can be recognized a progressive
enlargement and elaboration of architectural space that passed to embrace territorial and town
planning variables. And all of these ingredients resulted in a distinct historiography of
planning.
5.3. Around the 1992 celebrations
Besides the resurface of space and territory prompted by the historical conservacion of
centres and the appearance of Latin American treatises, other geopolitical, institutional
and editorial factors contributed in the 1980s to the interdisciplinary and international
studies within the Iberian American bloc. Especially from the 1970s, Spain had stressed its
role as patron of events on the urban history of Hispanic America—whose common past
and legacy had been a stronghold of the Franco era which was about to end. Spain also
increased its importance as the region’s editorial and translation centre of European and
American text and research books on urban economics, sociology and history.25 As a
24 My translation of: ‘A mi regreso mire con otros ojos y valore los pequenos poblados, las relaciones con el
paisaje, las calidades espaciales de la arquitectura popular, la simpleza de las soluciones y la vivencia de los
espacios comunitarios. La relacion ambiental tomo un papel protagonico y todo ello ayudo a desmontar una
formacion mas basada en propuestas enciclopedistas y en las verdades ‘absolutas’ del movimiento moderno’.25 In 1982 was held in Madrid, for instance, the Simposio de Urbanismo e Historia Urbana del Mundo Hispanico
(Symposium of Urbanism and Urban History of the Hispanic World), followed by the Seminario sobre la Ciudad
Iberoamericana (Seminar on the Iberian American City), sponsored and organized by CEHOPU in Buenos Aires
in 1985. In terms of publications, it is noteworthy the contribution of Gustavo Gili, an editorial specialized in
architecture, planning, building and topography, whose catalogue includes not only translation of Italian
historiography—Benevolo, Sica, Aymonino and Rossi, among others—but also classics published in English by
Reissman, Sutcliffe, and other authors. Other classics were gathered in the ‘Ciencia Urbanıstica’ (Town Planning
Science) series, edited by Manuel de Sola-Morales Rubio, with translations by ETSAB. There also were the series
‘Nuevo Urbanismo’ (New Urbanism) and ‘Hombre. Sociedad. Ciudad’ (Man. Society. City), published by the
former Instituto de Estudios de Administracion Local (IEAL, Institute of Local Administration Studies), featuring
titles in urban planning (McLoughlin), sociology (Ledrut, Remy and Voye), economics (Goodall) and history
(Barel, Sica, Muratori).
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 115
result of the endeavours of Salvador Tarrago and Jose Antonio Fernandez, from the early
1980s the Centro de Estudios Historicos de Obras Publicas (CEHOPU, Centre of
Historical Studies of Public Works) supported initiatives of historians and urban planners
such as Antonio Bonet Correa, Carlos Sambricio, Francisco de Solano and Fernando de
Teran. All these influences and sponsorship would be of great importance for Latin
American scholars such as Hardoy and Gutierrez (Almandoz, 2004: 245), who in turn
benefited—after the end of the dictatorial cycle that had ended with the defeat in the
Falklands war—from the renewal of university life in Argentina, which probably was, by
the late 1980s, Latin America’s most mature country in terms of urban historiography.
The old transatlantic platform was thus institutionally and epistemologically
consolidated, now strengthened by the interdisciplinary perspectives of the New History,
the 1992 celebration of the fifth centenary of the Americas’ Discovery and, last but not
least, Spain’s bonanza after joining the former EC—as had also Portugal, though
economically overshadowed by its neighbour. With a strong geopolitical component
provided by institutions such as the Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional
(AECI, Spanish Agency of International Cooperation), the National Commission of the
fifth centenary and the Union de Ciudades Capitales Iberoamericanas (UCCI, Union of
Iberian America’s capital cities), this new agenda was materialized in a series of collective
works that addressed the urbanization, urban change and town planning for different
periods. Bonet’s Urbanismo e historia urbana en el mundo hispanoamericano (1985),
Solano’s compilations of Historia y futuro de la ciudad iberoamericana (1986) and
Historia urbana de Iberoamerica (1990), as well as Alomar’s De Teotihuacan a Brasilia
(1987, Fig. 34), stand out as lavish books where, beyond their big format and abundance of
illustrations, a morphological approach blurred the remains of the SoD’s economy-
reductive interpretations. From the other side of the Atlantic, Hardoy’s and Morse’s
Repensando la ciudad de America Latina (1988) was another result of an event that
anticipated the fifth centenary;26 although it cannot be considered a book of urban history
as a whole, some of its chapters would have significant influence for the development of
Latin America’s planning history in the 1990s. Without labelling it as book of urban
history either, Nora Clichevsky’s review of Latin America’s urbanization in the second
half of the 20th century must be singled out too (Clichevsky, 1990: 21–78).
After the Seminar about the Iberian American city organized in Buenos Aires in 1985,
also the CEHOPU’s programme included the organization of the itinerant exhibition and
later edition of the book La ciudad iberoamericana. El sueno de un orden (1989, Fig. 35).
As it was pointed out in the introduction by its curator, Fernando de Teran, the exhibition
focused on ‘the morphological and functional aspects whose materialization is brought
about by infrastructures, the forms of social organization and the relationship between the
city with its hinterland’. Even though this was an emphasis partly explained by the
CEHOPU’s nature as a centre focused on infrastructure, it was also indicative of an
emerging Latin American historiography that, after the SoD’s economic structuralism,
returned to its spatial, morphological and territorial references. But at the same time,
maturity enabled it to step aside from architecture, which was important ‘only inasmuch as
26 Later translated into English (Hardoy, 1988, 1990).
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(the latter) contributes to shaping the urban space and characterizing the city’s visual
image’ (Teran, 1997: 14).27 At least concerning the perspective of comparative works, this
was a statement of adulthood by a field that regarded itself as autonomous, and also of
morphological revival by a book that epitomized the new urban historiography prompted
by the 1992 celebrations.
From the 1990s, the development of Latin America’s urban historiography has been
strengthened by national academic networks, at least in the cases of Mexico and Brazil—
the latter emerging as the most professional context in this respect.28 Throughout that
decade there also was the proliferation of case studies for different periods,29 that have
been elaborated by a new generation of professionals, most of them architects assimilated
to history, that have surpassed, the chronicle and the antiquarian or morphological stances
of nearly a century ago. While this flowering confirms the vitality of the field that is being
delimited on the local scale, only few works reach the general or comparative perspective,
what is symptomatic of the still-incipient consolidation. Apart from the endless urban
catalogue of case studies, there are few occasions when the broader and more ambitious
study is undertaken, as it has been done, for instance, by Brewer-Carıas (1997, Fig. 36) in
relation to the model city resulting from the Law of Indies; or in the compilation of Dois
secolos de pensamento sobre a cidade (Fig. 37), both reference work and textbook where
Vasconcelos (1999) carries a review of the incorporation of ‘the intra-urban as a field of
knowledge’ within geography.
To a great extent resulting from the myriad of international events and research projects
based in universities, the main problem with this way of growing is its orientation towards
an excessive casuistry—namely urban or national case studies often approached for a
specific period of time. This casuistry is favoured by scattered publications, whose higher
level of aggregation usually are the papers in proceedings and the articles in journals or
compilations. Such a dispersion is paradoxically fuelled by factors related to the way of
production and evaluation in an expanding academia. Gutierrez has well pointed out in this
respect that, after the long-lasting post-ponement of research–mainly due to the lack of
doctoral programmes in Latin America’s architectural schools—the pressure drawn from
the parameters of basic sciences to maximize the value of case-study research aimed at
appearing in journals or other periodicals, instead of producing books in Spanish or
Portuguese, can increasingly be felt in the academia (Almandoz, 2004: 249). So, while
progress has certainly been made in relation to articulating national research networks and
27 My translations drawn from: ‘sobre los aspectos morfologicos y funcionales cuya materializacion se produce a
traves de las infraestructuras, las formas de organizacion espacial y las relaciones de la ciudad con el territorio
circundante’.‘La arquitectura es objeto de atencion solamente en la medida en que contribuye a la formacion y
configuracion del espacio urbano y la caracterizacion de la imagen visual de la ciudad’.28 Sponsored by Brazil’s National Association of Graduate and Research Studies on Urbanism (ANPUR,
Associacao Nacional de Pos-graduacao e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional), the first Seminar on the
History of City and Urbanism was held in Bahıa (1990), followed by Salvador (1992), Sao Carlos (1994), Rio de
Janeiro (1996), Campinas (1998), Natal (2000), Salvador de Bahıa (2002) and Niteroi (2004). Urban history has
also been a track in the meetings of Mexico’s National Network of Urban Research (RNIU, Red Nacional de
Investigacion Urbana), which has been gathering since the early 1990s.29 It is not possible to offer here an enumeration that would necessary be incomplete. I have tried to give a
catalogue for the republican period in Almandoz (2003d).
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 117
consolidating graduate systems, it is increasingly difficult to find research works and
authors that go beyond local case studies or national perspectives for specific topics or
periods at the most.
In spite of the endeavours of Latin America’s academia to adopt the parameters of
North America’s, the latter has been reluctant to recognize the growth and maturity of the
urban and planning historiography developed by their Latino counterparts. Apart from the
gringos’ short-sighted chauvinism, such an attitude has partly to do with the reductionism
entailed by casuistry. Since, the 1970s there has been groundless assessments about the
allegedly unexplored or fledgling condition of Latin America’s urban historiography,
posed by researchers located out of the region, sometimes when renown publications such
as the Journal of Urban History or the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
decide to devote an issue or section to the Latin American ‘case’ (Morse, 1975b: 60;
Guerra, 1989: 606; Armus and Lear, 1998; Torre, 2002), not to mention those journals that
do not even take into account the literature written in Spanish or Portuguese. Those
assertions mirror, on the one hand, the huge gap that persists between both scholarships
and their respective productions in English and Spanish or Portuguese, what is due to
cultural and idiomatic factors alike. On the other, those judgements reproduce the
excusable yet still arrogant ignorance, by North American or European scholars, about
Latin America’s copious production on urban history since the 1960s at least—a
production that we have tried to revisit and set in perspective in this article.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123118
6
Conclusions and challenges
Although the research about Latin America’s urban and planning historiography that
this article relies upon is still in progress, there can be drawn some conclusions regarding
the main trends and four episodes identified above, in terms of the historical relationship
with the practices of urbanism and planning.
The first historical approaches to city and planning almost ran parallel to the 1930s
institutionalization of urbanismo in Latin America’s universities and local governments,
which occurred under the predominance of French culture and academic tradition of
design. Initiated at both sides of the Atlantic by, on the one hand, art historians with a
morphological and evolutionist emphasis; and boosted, on the other, by visiting urbanistes
to Latin America’s capitals from the 1930s, the process of transfer and shaping of the
historical component was part of the emerging agenda of urban studies and town planning
in national contexts marked by urbanization and populism. Epitomized by Brunner’s
Manual de urbanismo and della Paolera’s works, the morphology and evolutionism of that
first episode were in consonance with a germinal phase of the discipline in which—as in
the civic studies of Geddes and Mumford, as well as in the evolutionism of Poete, Lavedan
and Bardet—epistemology and history were still vital nourishments for the urban design.
CIAM’s functionalism provided the professional substratum for Latin America’s post-
war shift from urbanismo to planificacion, which also was a geopolitical and cultural
displacement, some of whose epistemological and historical implications would be posed
in the books of Harth-Terre and Randle. The relationship with social sciences and planning
was strengthened with the historical review of Latin America’s unbalanced processes of
industrialization, urbanization and modernization. As a confirmation of the institutional
platform that was also present in the ISI’s patronage by the ECLA, the functionalist agenda
of the Latin American city was backed, from the 1950s, by UN and OAS agencies, such as
UNESCO, CLACSO and the SIAP. But the differentiation of urban history was only
possible when local groups of scholars gathered at international events and academic
centres such as ICA, CEUR and CIHE, entering from the 1960s into a phase of
specialization and maturity in which Hardoy and Gasparini, among others, emerged as
continental leaders. In this respect, it must be reminded that, even though the antecedents
of urban historiography in Europe and North America can be traced back to the late 19th
century, its real consolidation took place from the 1960s. So Latin America’s urban
historiography did not emerge much later than in those contexts after all.
Latin America’s shift towards the SoD interpretations was partly prompted by the
malaise ensuing the failure of developmentalism and modernization after the 1960s. Often
combined with the widespread and more significant presence of the Marxist structuralism
in the Latin American academia, the SoD paid great attention to political, social and
economic variables of the process of urbanization, but did not manage to incorporate the
space and territory into the analysis. Only Segre could be regarded as the Marxist historian
that tried to maintain a regional and urban scale throughout the prolonged years dominated
by the Dependence approach.
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 119
A return to the architectural and morphological roots of Latin America’s planning
historiography was prefigured through different ways. From the 1970s, issues such as the
conservacion of historic centres and the entorno of architecture were announced in Segre’s
books, theorized by Waissman, and later feed-backed the emergence of Gutierrez’s text,
all of which were very close to architectural historiography. On the basis of new
institutions (AECI, UCCI, CEHOPU) and publications prepared for the 1992 fifth
centenary, mainly sponsored Spain’s boom after joining the EC, the reinsertion of the
urban space was completed from the 1980s through a new morphology resulting from
the interaction between Latin American and Iberian scholars. From then on, the balance of
the myriad of case studies with comparative or general perspectives has become the major
challenge of Latin America’s urban historiography.
Confirming that the morphological ingredient had predominated in Latin America’s
urban historiography, ‘as a consequence of a formalist vision of art history and,
concurrently, of the model-oriented mentality of the modern movement’, Gutierrez has
also pointed out that the original architectural conception has been enhanced by other
trends and components of urban studies in general, especially those required by the
participative planning that is indispensable in Latin America’s dynamic urban reality. So
that ‘studies about the everyday life, about the articulation of social groups, about the role
of neighbourhoods and communities have considerably enriched the urban history’
(Almandoz, 2004: 246),30 while reconstructing a political and social micro-history that
enables town planning to resume its local, spatial and urbanısticos origins. Even though I
agree with Gutierrez regarding the morphological predominance of Latin America’s
planning historiography in the initial and final episodes considered in this article, I believe
that the agenda of the field has not become as wide as it should be in order to incorporate
fundamental subjects of this part of the Third World. Amongst them, urban poverty and
shanty towns stand as dramatic examples of an unwritten history that is perhaps the most
urgent chapter that Latin America’s planning historiography must tackle, at least in
relation to the practice of the discipline.
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