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