Order and Disorder—: A Model of Latin American Urban Land Use

Order and Disorder—A Model of Latin American Urban Land Use W il l ia m K . C r o w l e y Professor, Department of Geography Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA 94928 Presidential address delivered to the Association ofPacific Coast Geographers, Northridge, California, 17 June, 1994 Should a physics professor wish to demonstrate the concept of inertia he or she could choose no better example than models of urban spa­ tial structure. For nearly sixty years the principal models of urban structure were all based on United States cities. Text after text pro­ moted (and still promote!) the classical concentric zone, sector, and multiple nuclei models as though these abstractions represented all cities everywhere. Eventually, investigators recognized the need for other models in other cultural situations and began to produce culturespecific generalizations. Latin American cities, among others, began to receive attention, and Gilbert’s recent characterization of them suggests their singularity: there is ... something that makes the region’s cities distinctive from most cities elsewhere. The common bond comes partly from language (al­ though that does not really apply to Brazil), and partly from a common 9 10 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 57 • 1995 history and the strong cultural roots that were laid during almost three hundred years of Iberian rule. The link also comes from the broadly similar level of development across the region___ The parallels also derive from the extreme inequality that characterizes all of the region’s cities bar those of Cuba. Whatever the precise cause, there is a quality and distinctiveness about the Latin American city that needs to be explained and understood (Gilbert 1994,21). Though Gilbert’s comments are recent, geographers had begun to design general models of Latin American urban spatial structure with the appearance of Baker’s (1970) unpublished work on Mexi­ can cities. German geographers Borsdorf (1976) and Bahr (1976) then followed with two important works. Borsdorf proposed a rela­ tively simple model based on some Chilean cities, and Bahr presented what may be the best general model of Latin American cities yet designed (he called it a model for Latin America’s “metropolitan cities”1 ). Mertins (1980) presented a modified version of Bahr’s work in his examination of Andean cities, and Bahr and Mertins (1981, 1983) together offered slight further revisions of the same basic model. Griffin and Ford (1980), apparently unaware of the works of Baker, Bahr, and Borsdorf, published an insightful yet simple model for all of Latin America. Their scheme has become the standard reference, published in text after text, a veritable Burgess (1925), Hoyt (1939), and Harris and Ullman (1945) for Latin America, all wrapped into one package.2 Geographers created a number of additional models from the late 1970s onward, including others by German geographers. Wilhelmy and Borsdorf (1984) published a two-volume work on Latin Ameri­ can cities that identified several of the models that had been published to that point. Generally, most works have examined only a limited part of Latin America or have presented data from a specific city or cities. Some concerned themselves only with particular land uses, usually residential. These models and others published more recently offer modest to significant alterations of the early models, but, with the exception of those of Bahr and Mertins, the spatial models to CROWLEY: Order and Disorder 11 date paint an orderly picture of homogeneous zones of land use, usually covering a contiguously built-up area. In general, they fail to capture the late-twentieth-century dynamic of the Latin American city. The goal of the present effort is to suggest reasons for the general lack of realistic model construction and then to present a model that incorporates the disorder as well as the order of urban Latin America, extending the work of Bahr and Mertins. This comprehensive model is built on separate models for each of the principal land uses: com­ mercial, industrial, and residential. In each of these sub-models transportation receives modest consideration. Before looking at the Latin American city, however, we need to explore some concerns that I believe are keys to explaining some of the flaws in past models and that are crucial in developing a...