almandoz a.-urban planning and historiography l. a.- 43 ver

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.

E-mail address: [email protected]

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mailto:[email protected]

A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–12382

1

Introduction

From the 1990s, especially after a seminal article by Jorge Hardoy (1988, 1990) about

Latin America’s importation of Europe’s urban theories from 1850 through 1930, the

study of urban transfer into that region has been mainly focused on the contribution by

foreign visitors and their proposals of urban design from the early 20th century. Beyond

the scope of this relatively recent agenda, if the process is regarded in a more

comprehensive way, other variables and aspects of that cultural transference emerge as

equally interesting. This is the case of famous visitors’ contributions to local academic

contexts, as well as the influence that foreign books and schools had in the consolidation of

Latin America’s urban-related agenda, including urban and planning history. Although,

some steps have been taken to map out the continent’s architectural historiography

(Gutierrez, 1997; Torre, 2002), apart from national case studies, the emergence of

planning history remains unexplored from a continental perspective. Departing from but

going beyond the mere importation involved in this process of disciplinary differentiation,

this article aims at identifying books and academic changes that, in the context of

pioneers’ reforms and specialists’ events, help to explain how planning history was shaped

and consolidated in Latin America from the 1930s through the 1990s. As a parallel pursuit,

it will be considered how these discursive formation of historiography took place amidst

political, economic, social and demographic changes, completed with practical shifts in

urbanism and regional planning.

The theoretical formation to be pursued in this article relies on the book as a discursive

unit throughout which epistemological relationships can be traced. I am aware of the

objections pointed out by Foucault regarding the questionable use of unites de discours,

such as the notions of continuity (tradition, development, influence, evolution, mentality,

spirit), the vague entity of books and works, as well as the contested separations between

disciplines, among other epistemological stratagems upon which ‘discursive regularities’

have been established, mostly in social sciences. However, I still believe that the author of

L’archeologie du savoir (1969) well demonstrated that the blurred borders of the ‘little

parallelepiped’ that the book is, whose figure and definition changes from the very

moment when it is twisted in our hands, enables us to adopt it as a thread for this search.

For, as Foucault pointed out: ‘The margins of a book are never either well-defined or clear-

cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the final period; beyond its internal configuration

and the shape that makes it autonomous, the book is involved in a system of reference to

other books, to other texts, to other phrases: node within a network’ (Foucault, 1992:

33–34).1 Adopted in the postdoctoral research this article is drawn from, this bookish

emphasis lies at the same time on an epistemological conception, ranging from Hayden

1 My translation of: ‘C’est que les marges d’un livre ne sont jamais nettes ni rigoureusement tranchees: par-dela le

titre, les premieres lignes et le point final, par-dela sa configuration interne et la forme qui l’autonomise, il est pris

dans un systeme de renvois a d’autres livres, d’autres textes, d’autres phrases: nœud dans un reseau’.

A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81–123 83

White and Michel de Certeau through Paul Ricoeur, according to which history is mainly a

‘literary artifice’ (Ricoeur, 1991, III: 287).

That nodal condition of the book thus enables us to adopt it as an operative category

throughout this historical quest. Although they may sometimes be drawn from fields other

than urbanism and planning, the books referred to and consulted here made specific and

significant contributions to the historical study of Latin America’s city and urbanization,

urbanism and planning. But beyond their texts, the corpus of books considered mirror a

complex of relationships with Latin America’s urban and social contexts, academic

changes and professional practice of the discipline, all of which can be regarded as

variables or epistemological factors that the article aims at putting together. Also assuming

the fact that some planning movements and statements have oriented the historical

narrative (Hebbert and Sonne, 2004), the meaning of books and other theoretical variables

is to be contextualized and set in perspective with the influence that some changes of the

professional practice of urban planning has had in shaping the agenda of historiography.2

Considering that the two trends of ‘urban’ and ‘planning’ history are not so

differentiated in Latin America as in Britain and the United States, the discursive

formation to be reviewed in this article often intertwines the historiography of the main

objects of those variants: city and urbanization, urbanism and planning. I have tried

elsewhere to sketch out that distinction, basically assuming that, in the Latin American

context, historia urbana relates to the city as both a social and spatial form, as well as to

the process of urbanization, whereas the historia urbanıstica deals with the constitution of

the discipline and practical ways of shaping and modifying the urban settlement and space

(Almandoz, 2003a,b,c,d, 2004a,b). But it is not a distinction that can be maintained in this

article, where most of the references and rationale of analysis ultimately relate to the

history of planning and the way it has been enriched by institutional changes in the

national, professional and academic grounds. In this respect, it can be said that, instead of

the dichotomy between urban and planning history, the article’s mainstream moves along

planning history as a sub-discipline of planning or urbanism, and history of planning as a

subject matter within planning history. But this will not prevent us from occasionally using

the term ‘urban’ history, in a rather generic sense, to imply the how the processes of the

city and urbanization have been dealt with.

The sequence of the article reviews some stages—resulting from the combination of the

discursive variables and factors mentioned above. After identifying some antecedents

from historical geography, art history and social sciences, the itinerary starts by reviewing

the influence of the 1930s visits to the continent of famous urbanists who were

representative of different trends of the emerging discipline. The feature of this inaugural

moment of urbanism is sought in the close relationship between evolutionism and

morphology, what was mirrored in early texts, events and authors that underpinned the

eventual constitution of planning history as a subject matter. Following a chronological

order, but without intending to provide a historical account of the period, the second

episode is framed within Latin America’s developmental modernization after the second

world war, which ran parallel to the shift from European-oriented urbanismo towards US-

2 It is something that Sutcliffe (2003), for instance, has reconstructed for the British context.


influenced planificacion. In the heyday of vernacular modernisms, the emergence of a

more specialized historiography is explained as a result of Latin America’s adoption of

international agendas of modernization, completed by the exchange of regional scholars

with other nuclei in Europe and North America. After the failure of developmental

modernization, a third episode is differentiated by the shift of Latin America’s social

sciences towards the predominantly-Marxist School of Dependence, whose structuralism

often obliterated the spatial and territorial references that are essential to planning history.

In the midst of neo-liberal reforms, the fourth episode looks at the reinsertion of space and

the emergence of a new morphology, resulting not only from the post-modern relationship

between architecture and urbanism, but also by the invigorated interaction between the

Iberian and Latin American blocs.

Throughout all those episodes, the ways in which these academic approaches to theory

and history influenced or were influenced by the practice of the discipline stand out as an

epistemological feature that, besides confirming the mutual dependence between the two

domains of theory and practice, help to explain at the same time some of the peculiarities

and biases of Latin America’s urban historiography. Particularly revealing in this respect

are to be the interviews with two major historians of the region, Roberto Segre and Ramon

Gutierrez, (Almandoz, 2003a, 2004a), whose testimonies become here fundamental pieces

of primary information for this article’s reconstruction of the main episodes of Latin

America’s planning historiography.


2

Urbanismo, morphology and evolutionism

2.1. Early urbanization and populism

By 1920, Latin America’s most advanced regions boasted two citizens per each peasant

that had remained in the backward pampas, llanos or sertao of their vast countryside. This

is of course a gross indicator that camouflages a sharply contrastive reality, as most of

what has to do with this continent, in which Argentina and the Southern Cone had more

than 50% of its population urbanized since 1914, whereas Andean or Central American

countries were predominantly rural until the 1950s (Beyhaut, 1985: 210–211). In spite of

its relative simplification, demographic indicators mirror, though, an unmistakable reality:

triggered since the very beginning of the 20th century in some republics, the process of

urbanization would spiral in most of Latin America in the second third of the century.

Though only in demographic terms, in a few decades was completed a cycle that had taken

more than 100 years in Britain and other nations industrialized and urbanized throughout

the 19th century (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 9–11).

As in other regions of today’s so-called third world, the speedy pace of Latin America’s

20th-century urbanization intensified concentrations within a map of contrast with rural

backwardness and dispersion. Flooded with both foreign and rural-to-urban immigration,

former colonial capitals and new centres rapidly reached magnitudes which rivalled

European and North American metropolises. Buenos Aires jumped from 663 000 people

in 1895 to 2 178 000 in 1932; Santiago from 333 000 in 1907 to 696 000 in 1930; and

Mexico city from 328 000 in 1908 to 1 049 000 in 1933. As a dramatic case comparable to

the growth of industrial cities like Manchester and Chicago, Sao Paulo spiralled from

240 000 inhabitants in 1900 to 579 000 in 1920, and 1 075 000 in 1930, while the urban

primacy of Rio was diminished, its population increasing from only 650 000 in 1895 to

811 433 in 1906. The expansion of the capitals was partly due to an incipient process of

industrialization that accelerated urbanization in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Cuba,

which figured among the world’s most urbanized countries at the time of the Depression in

1930. Havana’s population had jumped from 250 000 inhabitants by the turn of the century

to 500 000 in 1925. Mainly fuelled by rural-to-urban migration, other capitals of the

Andean countries also grew considerably: Bogota went from 100 000 people in 1900 to

330 000 in 1930, while Lima increased from 104 000 in 1891 to 273 000 in 1930.

Although Caracas rose only from 72 429 inhabitants in 1891 to 92 ,212 in 1920, the first

effects of the oil boom pushed the population from 135 253 in 1926 to 203 342 in 1936

(Hardoy, 1990: 22; Almandoz, 2002: 21).

Not always reaching the drama of the Mexican revolution in 1910—which had been

partly unleashed by the oblivion of the feudal-like countryside under the modernizing

governments of Porfirio Dıaz (1877–1880, 1884–1911)—Latin American states could not

stretch to the 20th century the liberalism and positivism of the nineteenth, as the Porfiriato

had tried to do. Challenged by demands in terms of universal suffrage, constitutions of

unions and other political rights, the governments of Jose Batlle y Ordonez (1903–1907,


1911–1915) in Uruguay, Roque Saenz Pena (1910–1913) and Hipolito Yrigoyen (1916–

1922) in Argentina exemplified early attempts to adjust the emerging populism to the

demands of rapid urbanization. Most of the claims of the heterogeneous masa that grew in

the metropolises had to do with problems faced by the urban mass in terms of

accommodation and sanitary conditions in volatile cities that could no longer maintain, for

political and demographic reasons alike, their post-colonial shortages in services and

infrastructure (Romero, 1984; Pineo and Baer, 1998).

Official and private answers to those demands would configure the agenda of the two

first decades of the 20th century, especially in terms of hygienic and housing reforms of

the historic centres, as well as the design of suburban residences for an increasingly

cosmopolitan bourgeoisie (Almandoz, 2002: 28–31). Flirting, on the one hand, with early

samples of the International Style and Art Deco imported for their lavish villas in the posh

barrios of Buenos Aires or Sao Paulo, this snobbish clientele of newly-urbanized

hacendados and ‘coffee barons’ was still keen, on the other hand, on a more academic

repertoire inherited from the Belle Epoque, ranging from Beaux Arts to Art Nouveau. It

was an ambivalence of architectural taste that the public sector also evinced in their

programmes of administrative or civic buildings, as it had been manifested in the 1910s

celebrations of the first centenary of Latin American republics.

In the midst of this scene of piecemeal reforms and eclectic changes, urbanism was not

institutionalized until the 1920s. But unlike European countries where the consolidation of

planning was strongly associated with the passing of legislation, either on the national or

local levels, Latin America’s urbanismo was to be proclaimed by new plans for the major

cities, which served as manifestoes or birth certificates of the new discipline.

2.2. Local and foreign experts

By the late 1920s, industrial growth, demographic mobility and urban sprawl evinced the

necessity of Latin America’s major capitals to adopt plans, which were undertaken by local

governments relying on both foreign experts and new generations of native professionals.

Confirming the specialization of the discourse and the discipline that had accompanied the

emergence of urbanism in industrialized countries, the urban agenda gained room in technical

journals and magazines that were published during the first decades of the 20th century.

Among them stood out La Ciudad (1929) in Buenos Aires; Planificacion (1927) and Casas

(1935) in Mexico;Ciudad y Campo in Lima; zig-zag andUrbanismo y Arquitectura (1939) in

Chile; El Cojo Ilustrado, Revista Tecnica del Ministerio de Obras Publicas and Revista

Municipal delDistritoFederal (1939) in Caracas (Fig. 1). The influence of European maestros

was still evident in the widespread use of books by Camillo Sitte, Marcel Poete, Pierre

Lavedan and Raymond Unwin, among others that were translated or circulated in their

original versions among Latin American professionals (Almandoz, 2002).3

Besides the Inter-American Conferences and Pan-American Congresses of Architects

that took place since the 1920s, technical innovations in urbanism were exchanged at

3 The following paragraphs are drawn from the review in this chapter, where some other specific bibliography in

Spanish or Portuguese can be found. Only some references in English are included here.


international events that, from the following decade, were focused on diverse components

of the emerging field. Chile held a national congress on architecture and urbanism in 1934,

and the first international Congreso de Urbanismo (Congress of Urbanism) was held in

Buenos Aires in 1935; later on, the first Congreso Interamericano de Municipalidades

(Inter-American Congress of Municipalities) took place in Havana in 1938, and the second

in Santiago in 1941. In relation to housing, the first Congreso Panamericano de Vivienda

Popular (Pan-American Congress of low-cost housing) also took place in Buenos Aires in

1939, and the 16th International Congress on Planning and Housing was held in Mexico

City in 1938. Celebrated in Washington the following year, the 15th International

Congress of Architects also represented a distinct opportunity for Latin American

professionals to update and exchange their experiences (Hardoy, 1988: 99–100, 123–126).

Confirming the importance that administrative changes had for the consolidation of

planning—as had happened in industrial countries before 1914—Latin America’s

planning machinery did not take shape until the second half of the 1920s, when urban

problems became a public issue of administrative regulation. Most of the national or

municipal offices of urban planning in Santiago, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City,

Rio, Sao Paulo, Lima, Bogota and Caracas were a joint effort among local and national

governments, new professional associations, and urban research centres. Some acting at

the same time as administrative heads, urban designers and promoters, an indigenous

generation of de facto urbanistas would emerge from these offices in charge of elaborating

the inaugural plans for the emerging metropolises. There were included Carlos Contreras

in Mexico City, Mauricio Cravotto in Montevideo, Carlos della Paolera in Buenos Aires,

Francisco Prestes Maia and Anhaia Mello in Sao Paulo, Pedro Martınez Inclan in Havana,

and Leopoldo Martınez Olavarrıa and Carlos Raul Villanueva in Caracas.

As a belated expression of the inter-war colonialism in Latin America, which was still

seduced by the old world’s cultural and academic prestige, the new offices of urbanism,

though boasting teams that already were professionally mature, hired famous experts from

Europe, either as advisors or coordinators of the plans to be produced. The new

instruments seemed to reach the value of manifestoes or birth certificates of the emerging

discipline, unlike European countries where the first planning laws had more

epistemological significance. Still capitalizing on the prestige of the eclectic side of

French urbanism in Belle-Epoque Latin America, conspicuous representatives of the so-

called ‘Ecole Francaise d’Urbanisme’ (EFU) were invited to participate in proposals and

plans for some capitals. In 1924 Jean-Claude Nicholas Forestier visited Buenos Aires,

where some of his ideas, inspired by the city beautiful, were incorporated into the first

‘Organic Project’ elaborated by the Comision de Estetica Edilicia (CEE, Commission of

Building Aesthetic), created for the Argentine capital in 1925. By then, Forestier’s Plan

para el Embellecimiento y Ensanche de La Habana (Plan for the Beautification and

Enlargement of Havana) was published and included in the Ley de Obras Publicas (Act of

Public Works) issued by Gerardo Machado’s new government (1925–1931).

The Beaux-Arts tradition seemed to renew and enlarge its repertoire during Leon

Jaussely’s visit to Montevideo in 1926, when the founder of the Societe Francaise des

Urbanistes (SFU) manifested his opposition to the colonial grid and his preference for the

introduction of some garden city principles in relation to urban expansion (Gutierrez,

2002: 64–66). Invited by the Prefect Antonio Prado Junior to coordinate a technical team


between 1926 and 1930, Donat-Alfred Agache masterminded a plan for Rio, which was a

methodological model with many geographical surveys and an informative synthesis of

the sprawling capital (Pereira, 2002: 98–102). A belated example of the EFU’s eclectic

tradition can be found in the first plan for Caracas (1939), drawn up by the Directorate of

Urbanism of the capital’s Federal District. Since, the creation of the latter in 1937, the

team of local experts had been boosted by the advice of the Paris-based office of Henri

Prost, whose junior associates, Jacques Lambert and Maurice Rotival, were sent to

Caracas to coordinate the plan (Gonzalez, 2002: 233–237; Hein, 2002). The French

advisers combined most of the ingredients of the EFU, which made possible the final

arrival of Haussmannesque surgery to the Venezuelan capital, after several decades of

Frenchified aspirations in its urban culture (Almandoz, 1999: 85–91).

An alternative message of modernity is what South Americans tried to get from inviting

Le Corbusier to visit Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Sao Paulo and Rio—a tour undertaken in

1929, while the second Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) took place

in Frankfurt. Meanwhile, more professional representatives of the German-speaking world

were also welcomed to foster the emerging urbanism of Latin America. Werner

Hegemann, who edited Der Stadtebau, was invited to Buenos Aires in 1931, where he was

hosted by ‘Los Amigos de la Ciudad’ (The Friends of the City), a pragmatic society which

was not satisfied with either the EFU’s academic proposals or Le Corbusier’s prefabricated

plans. The man responsible for Hegemann’s invitation was della Paolera, who had

graduated at the Institut d’Urbanisme. Since, his Parisian years, the Argentine engineer

was acquainted with the ideas of the Musee Social and the SFU, but also knew of

Hegemann’s combined scientific and humanist approach to planning (Collins, 1995). It

was also the case of the Austrian Karl Brunner (Fig. 2), whose long sojourns in Santiago

and Bogota confirmed him as the most conspicuous representative in Latin America of a

rationalist and contextualized Stadtebau pursued by some professionals in the aftermath of

Sitte’s aestheticism.

2.3. Legal, professional and academic milestones

In the midst of the administrative and technical changes that accompanied the first

offices and plans of urbanism, the institutional consolidation through university courses,

professional associations and exchanges in events were all early inputs for the eventual

emergence of planning historiography. Without pretending to thoroughly register the

consolidation of each Latin American country—what would be impossible not only

because of the extension limits of this article but also due to a bibliography for case studies

that is barely beginning to appear—let us just identify milestones that signalled the

maturity of some national milieus from the 1920s onwards.

One of the first courses of urbanismo was introduced in 1928 at the School of

Architecture of the University of Chile’s Faculty of Economic Sciences and Mathematics,

by Alberto Schade Pohlenz, author of a 1923 plan for Santiago (Fig. 3); strongly

influenced by Sitte’s aesthetics, his syllabus inspired a similar programme at the Catholic

University in 1929 (Hofer, 2003: 74–75). With the foundation of the Institute of Urbanism

and the issue of a Ley General de Construcciones y Urbanizaciones (General Law of

Buildings and Urban Developments) in the same year, followed by the celebration of the


first congress of Architecture and Urbanism in 1934, the country convulsed by then with

Arturo Alessandri’s reforms, stood out, though, as one of the most articulate platforms of

Latin America’s urbanism. After the departure of Brunner, who developed urban plans,

law proposals and university courses, his chair would be taken over until 1946 by his

disciple, Rodulfo Armando Oyarzun Philippi, while other fronts of his activity were

continued by other members of the first generation of Chilean urbanistas (Pavez, 1992:

2–3).

Post-revolutionary Mexico was another milieu early matured, boosted by the

technocratic reforms launched during the presidencies of Alvaro Obregon (1920–1924)

and Plutarco E. Calles (1924–1928). Promoted by the architect Manuel Ortiz Monasterio,

the course ‘City Planning and Civic Art’ was inaugurated in 1926 at the National School of

Fine Arts. Jose Luis Cuevas Pietrasanta was in charge of it until 1929, when it was taken

over by Carlos Contreras, founder of the Planificacion journal, while Cuevas introduced a

similar programme at the Autonomous University. Led by the Asociacion Nacional para la

Planificacion de la Republica Mexicana (ANPRM, National Association for the Planning

of the Mexican Republic), the celebration of the first national conference on this subject in

1930, as well as the passing of a general law on planning in the same year, confirm

Mexico’s pioneering development of a professional and legal groundwork. A campaigner

of this professionalization, Contreras endeavoured to create a faculty of planning that

would certify students in three years; even though this initiative was not carried out, a

graduate programme on Urbanism and Planning was created, as early as 1939, at the

National Polytechnic Institute’s High School of Engineering, probably the first in Latin

America (Sanchez Ruiz, 2002).

Though some changes were undermined by political instability and the later consolidation

of Getulio Vargas’s ‘Estado Novo’ (New State, 1937–1945), whose authoritarian centralism

did not seem to encourage local but national reforms, also Brazil showed advanced signs of

administrative, professional and academic institutionalization of urbanism. After the creation

of the short-lived National Association of Urbanism in 1927, another step towards its

institutionalization as a national matter was marked by the 1932 Department of Municipal

Administration, aimed at providing assistance to local governments. Confirming that the

prefects of Brazilian cities have often been renown experts in addition to public servants, Luiz

de Anhaia Mello (Fig. 4)—author of Problemas de urbanismo (1929)—organized in Sao

Paulo a Congress of Housing, followed by a week of Urbanism in Salvador de Bahia in 1935.

The carioca academia witnessed Lucio Costa’s 1931 reform of the Escola Nacional de Belas

Artes (ENBA, National School of Fine Arts), including courses of urbanism and landscape

within a curricular framework intended to make the teaching of architecture independent from

plastic arts. Later on, the prefect Pedro Ernesto would achieve the creation of the University of

the Federal District (UDF), where a first graduate programme on urbanismo was imparted

until the university was closed by Vargas’s regime in 1939 (Pereira, 2003: 79–80).

In the case of Argentina, after the creation of the CEE in 1925, the interest of

architectural for urbanism was evinced in the above-referred invitations to Le Corbusier

and Hegemann; the latter’s proposals were promoted from the Office of the Plan created in

1932. If the maturity of the professional milieu made possible the celebration of the first

Congress of Urbanism in 1935, an equivalent course at Rosario’s Universidad del Litoral


had been pioneered from 1929 by della Paolera (Fig. 5), who in 1933 took on a similar

course at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) (Randle, 1977: 12).

Among the foreign maestros whose contributions reached greater academic influence,

it was Brunner who not only consolidated the professional and institutional platforms of

Chile and Colombia, but also managed to produce a textbook where regional seeds of

planning history can be recognized. Published in Bogota in two volumes, Brunner’s

Manual de urbanismo (1939–1940, Fig. 6) provided a review of the solutions that the

emerging planning gave to the functional problems of world metropolises, with many

examples drawn from Latin America’s fast-growing cities. Based on the author’s 1924

course at Vienna’s National Faculty of Architecture, recommended in turn as model at

Heidelberg’s 1928 Congress of Urbanism, the manual aimed at comprehending the

‘scientific system’ of the discipline, comprising political–sociological, technical and

artistic components, the latter of which included the ‘history of urban art’ (Brunner, 1939,

I: 19, 24).

Before addressing the questions that a professional of his generation considered as

‘science of urbanism’—housing, sanitation, buildings, roads, traffic and underground

networks—Brunner structured a historical chapter about the ‘evolution’ of the modern

discipline. Looking at John Ruskin as one of the first to detect ‘the whole loss of the

aesthetic and artistic tradition’ that had been prompted by the industrial revolution,

Brunner singled out Sitte as the continuator of the Stadtebau tradition, which had

addressed itself to ‘the re-conquest of the artistic dogmas of past urbanism’ (Brunner,

1939, I: 13–18). Ruskin’s and Sitte’s historicist descent would be related to the ‘reformist

task’ carried on by Raymond Unwin and Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who approached ‘the

external aspect of cities, striving to gain anew a general understanding of the field of urban

art, on the basis of the lessons taught by historical buildings’. In spite of the gap between

this picturesque tradition and his more functional manual, Brunner seems to have aligned

himself with the alleged reformism of this trend, especially by comparison with the other

two identified. These were, on the one hand, the Beaux-Arts School, which, though

sometimes exhibiting ‘a confusion of architectural expressions and an exaggeration in

decoration’, did not lose a continuity that, jointly with the impact of Haussmann’s works

the school was associated with, made it reach ‘a persistent influence in American

metropolises’. On the other hand, as a third trend and component alike of the technique of

urbanism, Brunner identified the ‘art’ of Landscape Architecture, originally English but

then developed by John Nolen at Harvard University (Brunner, 1939, I: 15–17).4

By grouping and synthesizing the trends that allegedly accounted for the evolution of

contemporary urbanism—namely a historicist Stadtebau related to the English town

planning, the Haussmannian Beaux-Arts and a landscape architecture coming from the

city beautiful—Brunner recomposed traditions that, in spite of the noticeable absence of

CIAM’s already-consolidated presence, informed most of the palette that coloured Latin

4 My translation drawn from: ‘enfocando el aspecto exterior de las ciudades, empenandose en reconquistar un

entendimiento general en el campo del arte urbano, a base de la ensenanza resguardada en los monumentos

historicos’.


America’s first urban plans. And he also offered to Latino urbanistas the first historical

approach to the novel discipline from the standpoint of the practice of planning.

2.4. Morphological ingredients: history of art and evolutionism

In addition to the institutionalization of urbanismo as a professional and an academic

field, the eventual emergence of urban morphology and planning history in Latin America

can only be explained by considering other academic inputs, which ultimately link to the

historiography of art and architecture. Unlike countries like Britain and the United States,

where urban history derived from economic and social mainstreams, history of art seems

to have provided a first substratum for Latin America’s urban history, what makes it closer

to Italy’s early morphology (Zucconi, 2002). Encouraged by the Pan-American congresses

of architecture, held from 1924 onwards, Argentina’s Martın Noel and Mario Buschiazzo,

Peru’s Emilio Harth-Terre and Mexico’s Manuel Touissant published, from the late 1920s,

a series of works on Hispanic America’s history of art and architecture. Among the

periodicals that provided a platform for that first group of art historians was the University

of Mexico’s Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas from 1937, followed by the

UBA’s Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Esteticas, from 1948. The

endeavours of these art historians brought about a first set of morphological studies

focused on the colonial dameros (checkerboards) and later ensanches (expansions) of

Mexico City (1938), Buenos Aires (1940), Montevideo (1944), Lima (1945), Havana

(1945–1946) and Guatemala city (1948). Going beyond the antiquarian standpoint, in

most of those studies the ‘isolated building and its morphology are no longer the sole

concern of the art historian’ (Palm, 1968: 22, 26–27). On this morphological and artistic

platform, Stanislavsky (1947, 1950) and Kubler (1962, 1968) kept on working, from the

United States, on the subject of colonial architecture and urbanism in Hispanic America,

while Oskar Jurgens and E. Palm did the same from Germany.

Also Spain made a significant contribution to the historiography of Latin America’s art and

architecture. After Seville’s Iberian American Exhibition in 1922, which seems to have

revived the peninsula’s interest for the artistic expressions of its former colonies, the

notebooks on Arte en America y Filipinas appeared from 1935. Published by the Spanish

Diego Angulo Inıguez between 1933 and 1939, the Archivo de Indias collection of colonial

plans was followed by the mammothHistoriadel artehispanoamericano (1945–1956), edited

by Angulo Inıguez jointly with Enrique Marco Dorta and Mario Buschiazzo, whose volumes

referred to colonial layouts of Latin American capitals. It is also worth noticing the

considerable treatment given to the city in general encyclopaedias such as the Histoire

generale des civilizations (1953–1961), coordinated by Maurice Crouzet, which was

translated into Spanish and Portuguese almost immediately (Crouzet, 1960, 1961, 1960–

1965,). As Segre remembers, these reference works provided an early and stimulant input for

young generations to realize the necessity of the field of urban historiography in Latin America

(Almandoz, 2003a: 201). Their enthusiasm would be boosted by the publication of archival

collections of local or national scope, such as the plans of old Buenos Aires by Taullard, maps

of Colombia by Carlos Martınez, and Portugal’s by Silveira (Almandoz, 2004: 244).

Beyond the enthusiasm for the publication of archival plans and the awareness of artistic

and architectural heritage, the concern for the evolution of the city’s form and organism, in the


way announced by the founders of France’s modern urban historiography, was also present in

Latin America since the 1940s. Partly relying on the Nietschean biologism of Spengler’s

morphological history, books such as Marcel Poete’s Introduction a l’urbanisme: l’Evolution

des villes (1929) and Pierre Lavedan’sGeographie des villes (1936), unfolded an evolutionist

yet less-degenerative explanation of the city as a living organism subject to cycles (Poete,

1958; Lavedan, 1959). Both the palaeographer and the geographer intertwined different types

of sources, with special reference to maps, plans and other documents depicting the city’s

form and image. Beyond their explicative contribution within the theoretical and historical

domain of urbanisme, such treatises made use of some of the practical tools that started to be

systematically used by town and regional planning, as it had been advocated by Patrick

Geddes in Cities in Evolution (1915), another antecedent of that first generation of French

urban historiography (Almandoz, 2003c: 65–67). The practicality of the historical search

would be epitomized by Gaston Bardet, Poete’s disciple and son-in-law, whose L’urbanisme

(1945) catalogued old forms of post-Renaissance ‘urban art’ to underpin the bases of urbanism

as a scientific discipline (Bardet, 1967: 10–15).

If Geddes never came to be historically influential in Latin America, where it was

belatedly translated into Spanish in a series about housing and planning (Geddes, 1960,

Fig. 7), the French concern for the evolution of urban form had been long since shared by

Latino planners, even to a greater extent than their North American counterparts had. This

was one of the clearest post-cards included in Violich’s Cities of Latin America (1944)—

both a travel and technical book that presented, to the US public, the first overview of the

urban panorama and planning trends southwards of the Bravo river. When meeting some

of the local colleagues on his 1941–1942 journey, the Californian planner noticed that

Latin professionals were ‘European-trained, or prepared for the technical field in their own

country by European-trained professors’. In addition to their thorough technicality, Latin

professionals frequently had ‘a broader understanding of their own and related fields than

would be provided in similar training in the United States’. More than their North

American colleagues, Latin urbanistas also tended ‘to philosophize about the significance

of the city’s pattern, about the broad human objective of planning’. Knowing European

capitals ‘by heart’, most of the planners Violich talked to were still influenced by the

historical orientation of French urbanism, epitomized in books such as Poete’s Paris. Son

evolution creatrice (1938), which the visitor came across in some of the planners’ private

libraries (Violich, 1944: 158, 169, 173; Almandoz, 2002: 39).

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).


‘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).


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.


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.


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).


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.


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


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.


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’.


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’’.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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’


(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).’.


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,


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’.


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’.


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).


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).


(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).


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.


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 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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