Abstract
In recent decades, urban processes have experienced deep transformations. One of them has been the growing importance of urban sprawl. This article reviews its main features and the policies related to the paradigm of sustainability in three Latin American Megalopolises: Mexico City, Lima, and Santiago de Chile. For this purpose, we have carried out an extensive compilation of the existing academic literature. Urban sprawl in those cities cannot be understood without considering the rising housing needs of popular classes, usually addressed through the sequence settlement-parceling-building-urbanization. Simultaneously high-income groups tend to create separated and gated commodities and there is increasing spatial mobility of the middle classes. Those processes tend to generate highly segregated and increasingly patched metropolitan areas. Sustainability is framed on models of urban governance based on ecological modernization. In this context, three main sustainable policies are analyzed: water supply, green areas provision, and transport. Conclusions stress: (1) Deep changes experienced and the path-dependent element observed in the social construction of sustainability (2) Consolidation of a model of socially segregated and ecologically differentiated urban polycentrism (3) Relevance of the different megalopolises as niches of experimentation and innovation in the construction of specific forms of sustainable transition.
Highlights
In recent decades, urban processes have experienced deep transformations on a global scale, being generated by the new geography of urbanization
This article reviews its main features and the policies related to the paradigm of sustainability in three Latin American Megalopolises: Mexico City, Lima, and Santiago de Chile
Urban sprawl has completely transformed the physiognomy of cities in Latin America, generating and consolidating a model of an extensive and polycentric city
Summary
Urban processes have experienced deep transformations on a global scale, being generated by the new geography of urbanization. The dynamics of capital accumulation, together with the existing demographic growth have given rise to relevant phenomena of urban sprawl in the main capitals of the subcontinent In this sense, according to Inostroza (2017), some of the main Latin American capitals ( Bogotá, Lima, and Santiago de Chile) expand at a rate of 20 m2 per minute, which implies a strong consumption of space in the medium term [53]. The very dynamics of economic growth have generated processes of accumulation in the secondary circuit that have meant a growing occupation of spaces for a series of new commercial, logistical and service activities, with the consequent transfers of the population [49,54,55] It is an expansion with a relatively low level of planning since, in the neoliberal governance model, the search for economic profitability and public-private confluence prevails, excluding any type of intervention that could affect the basic elements of the real estate and financial interests at stake [56]. In such a segregated urban context, access to these basic services becomes an element that differentiates living conditions, reinforcing polarising tendencies [111]
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