Cartography of Concentrated Urbanization. Analysis of Global, Regional, and National Initiatives in Latin America

Abstract

Since the beginning of the XXI century, governments, international organizations, and academia have developed initiatives to intervene and govern cities, responding to global agreements and following the “urban era” narrative -a tipping point when humanity became predominantly urban-. Many initiatives insist on defining countries and regions as “urban” given their population concentration thresholds and by type of settlement. We consider such approximation reductive because, in line with other authors, we understand urban and urbanization not as empirical objects but theoretical categories to understand historical processes of concentration and extension with variable and dynamic socio-spatial dimensions. This article criticizes the linear transition model followed by these initiatives and questions their capacity to measure, map and govern the transformation produced by urbanization. To this end, we collected qualitative and quantitative multi-sector indicators from 9 initiatives on performance and spatial characterization of several cities and developed an unpublished Comparative Matrix of those indicators. We present the paradigmatic case of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, where we compare the initiatives, measurements, and cartographies for concentrated urbanization. Our findings are limited to that city, but by analyzing the other Latin American cities revealed recurrent problems: variability of scale; interpretation and comparability of metrics and cartographies; disconnection between evidence, interpretation models and prescriptions; empirical bias when characterizing urbanization; and difficulties for governance. With evidence from the Global South, we question the way narratives and methods form the Global North are imposed without critical reflection, these initiatives lack adequate frameworks for intervening the constant agitations and entanglements produce by contemporary urbanization.