Mobilités et Changement urbain. Bogotá, Santiago et São Paulo ed. by Françoise Dureau et al. (review)

The aim of this collective work is to understand the urban changes that are occurring in major Latin American metropolises in the early twenty-first century. As is indicated by the name of the project this work developed out of – METAL: Métropoles d’Amérique latine dans la mondialisation: reconfiguration territoriales, mobilité spatiale, action publique [METAL: Latin American metropolises in the globalization process: territorial restructuring, spatial mobility, public policy], emphasis here is on the restructuring of metropolises at the territorial level, inhabitants’ spatial mobility practices, the effects of public policy, and how these metropolises fit into the globalization process.

The authors –the four editors and approximately twenty Latin American or French researchers from a variety of disciplines, including geography, urban planning, demography, sociology, economics and statistics – study three of the seven Latin American cities with over 5 million inhabitants in 2000: São Paulo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile) and Bogotá (Columbia).

Chapter 1 analyses the specificities of the three cities and their shared characteristics. They differ in size (São Paulo has over 19.7 million inhabitants, Bogotá 7.7 million and Santiago 5.6 million) but also the position they occupy in their national urban systems (Santiago is the main city whereas the others share that role with other cities), administrative rank (Bogotá and Santiago are capital cities) and international migration systems (Santiago and São Paulo are now migrant destinations whereas Bogotá is a city of international emigration). Santiago appears the wealthiest and most developed of the three; Bogotá is characterized by high unemployment and low income. All three cities are at the same stage of urban and demographic transition: population growth is now due more to natural increase than migration flows.

Chapter 2 presents the METAL project and explains project methodology. The quantitative data come from national censuses and specific project surveys. Censuses were used above all to describe and analyse metropolitan spaces in terms of four spatial unit levels: the municipio (approximately 30 in each metropolis), the district (approximately one hundred per metropolis), the section (thousands per metropolis) and the rough equivalent of a city block (tens of thousands per metropolis). After harmonizing the census data for the three metropolises and the census yeas,⁽¹⁾ the authors developed an information system made up of simple indicators that allow for comparing metropolises and studying changes over time. To this were added three quantitative surveys on types of spatial mobility, all conducted in 2009. Household samples were drawn at two levels: city blocks representative of the diversity of each city’s population (10 survey zones) and a thousand randomly selected households within those zones. The mobility questionnaire was drawn up using event history surveys conducted in France and Southern countries; it collected the personal migration histories of all household members, household’s residential “system” over the preceding 12 months,⁽²⁾ and daily living area and family location at the time of the survey. Lastly, approximately one hundred qualitative interviews were conducted with persons residing in the different metropolises and former inhabitants who had migrated to European cities.

The findings are presented in eight chapters. Two examine macroscopic changes in the cities: “models of settlement in Bogotá and Santiago in the early twenty-first century” (Chapter 3) and “trends in residential segregation intensity and scale” in the three cities (Chapter 4). The findings presented in Chapter 3 qualify the urban settlement model according to which metropolises go through three consecutive phases – densification, depopulation of city centres and expansion of city outskirts: expansion and densification propensities were found to vary considerably from one metropolis to another and are not homogeneous within metropolises. But an overall trend can be observed: Bogotá is densifying while Santiago is expanding. Chapter 4 shows that spatial distribution by social class varies by metropolis...