The invention of the “third-world city”: urban planning in Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s

Abstract

While the first half of the 20th century was mainly characterized by the importation of urban planning models from Europe and the USA to Latin America, the 1960s represent a turning point: In the context of different development theories, local planners first started to emphasize the supposed structural similarities of Latin American cities and then their parallels with other cities of the Global South. Social theorists, economists and urbanists of the time conceptualized cities not only as litmus tests of the developmental stage of the individual country, but also as motors to enable economic progress. Analyzing different Latin American architectural and urban planning publications, the article traces references toother Latin American and “Third-World” countries that grew in size in the course of the 1960s. In some cases, this even led to South-South contacts in the field of urban planning to the research of which this article is a start.