The Fate of Latin American Mega-Cities

Latin America is due for a revolutionary migration to suburban and to smaller city living, breaking from the booming trend of population explosion in the largest of urban centers.  With uncontrolled population sizes continuing to grow, strains on infrastructure follow suit exponentially.  Emerging middle classes and dependent businesses, with new wealth and new freedoms, will soon start pushing urban boundaries and expand into larger “city-regions,” escaping congestion, crime, housing shortages, and pollution, which lead to inefficiency and declines in productivity.

According to The Economist (8/13/2011), “Latin America’s biggest cities now risk dragging down their country’s economies.”  $3 trillion in housing, sewage, electricity, and water investment is required to adequately account for Latin population growth.  By 2025, Bogota alone will need to double its housing supply, and this is becoming the norm rather than the exception.  Over the next decade and a half, the largest of these cities will experience declines in growth and output, predicts McKinsey Global Institute, a research and consultancy firm.  Meanwhile, medium sized cities will flourish with productivity at higher rates than their national averages.

Housing congestion in Lima, Peru

In the early 1900s America experienced similar trends.  In his book Cities of Tomorrow, Peter Hall notes that "New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston...[broke] down under the weight of congestion, inefficiency, and escalating social cost, and finally complete collapse.  The result was that these cities were fast becoming the least logical places to locate industry."  Both people and business flowed outward in what is now known as suburban sprawl, the city-region model that embodies the developed world’s way of life.

As South and Central America continue to promote emerging middle classes (see graphic 7/15/2011), a void demand for better planned, more manageable cities and suburbs will start to fill.  This does not mean that mega-cities will disappear, but alternative sites will sprout in response to unsustainable growth in current urban settings.  When building with clean slates, newly populated spaces must welcome the needed emphasis on infrastructure and planning. 

The Fate of Latin American Mega-Cities