Pre-Reading Notes

Hi there and welcome to Chapter 5: Middle and South America! ¡Qué bueno! Or if you’re in Brazil, que ótimo!

Think about your perception of this region a moment. What cultural features come to mind? Consider the languages I just used, Spanish and Portuguese – we’re kind of a long way from Spain and Portugal, so why would they speak these languages here? If you’ve been to the Caribbean islands before, you might have encountered elements of African culture – but we’re similarly quite a long distance from Africa.This region has been significantly impacted by colonization, and that has shaped everything from the languages used to its development patterns to its cultural landscape.

The core focus of this chapter is urban development, so pay close attention to what urban development, and development more broadly, looked like pre-colonization and how it shifted after colonization.

The learning objectives for Chapter 5, and questions you might consider, are:

• Identify the key geographic features of Middle and South America
  • What are the more important physical features of this region?
  • How does the physical geography of Middle and South America affect agriculture and settlement?
  • What were the patterns of human geography found in Middle and South America prior to colonization?
• Describe the primary patterns of colonial development found in Middle America
  • How did colonial development reshape the Middle American landscape?
• Analyze the patterns of urban development in South America
  • What was the focus of South American colonization and how did this impact urban development?
  • How would you describe modern South American urban development?
• Explain how globalization has shaped current issues of inequality across Middle and South America
  • Why does inequality persist across Middle and South America?
  • What global connections exist between this region and the rest of the world, and how do these connections impact local development?

Don’t forget to add your own review questions to this list as you read the chapter!

Notes After Reading

Welcome back to the notes for Chapter 5! I think you’ll find that starting with Chapter 5, the chapters generally seem to follow a similar framework where you have local development and local cultures, colonization, and then struggles to break free from a colonial development system. I know it can get a bit depressing, and it can be hard to reconcile with the role of more developed countries in keeping the peripheral countries in the periphery, particularly if you live in a more developed country, but digging deeper about this colonial history and how it has impacted development is critical to understanding the geography of the modern world.

I find students have the most questions about the Latin American city structure in this chapter, probably because it looks so different from models of North American cities. Let’s recall the model from the book:

Awesome! (I don’t mean awesome model, though I admit I’m pretty proud of this one, I mean awesome that you probably remembered reading about it in the book.) Okay, let’s break it down a little bit because I think the typical Latin American city structure is emblematic of the larger economic issues urban areas are facing. So in the center we have the CBD and central market area, which is similar to the North American city model. In Latin American cities, though, we often also have an extension of this commercial area along what we call the “spine.” Picture Rodeo Drive in California as an example – this might be a long boulevard of expensive shops and a mall area.

As discussed in Chapter 4, in North American cities pre-gentrification, the wealthier residents generally lived farthest away from the city center with lower income residents living close to the CBD. In Latin American cities, this is flipped. So, remember that in Latin American cities, the wealthiest residents live very close to the city center and along that commercial spine I just mentioned while the poorest residents live the farthest away. Follow me so far?

So in Latin American cities, the wealthiest people live along the spine, we find upper income residents right around the CBD (called the Zone of Maturity by geographers Ernest Griffin and Larry Ford who developed this model), then we have a transitional zone going from upper middle class to lower middle class (the Zone of In Situ Accretion.) Finally, we have the Zone of Peripheral Squatter Settlements. This represents the poorest citizens and they are squatters, meaning they do not own or pay rent on the land they occupy.

Did you notice the “Disamenity” area? What’s up with that? This is often the poorest area of the city and this sector might arise along an area of otherwise unoccupied land, sometimes alongside a rail line for example. Essentially, the zone of peripheral squatter settlements gets so large and so far away from the city that residents seek to occupy whatever land they can find, often building upward on what limited land is available.

Notice that the disamenity area goes right up against the wealthier areas. It looks something like this:

This is a picture of the Rocinha Favela, the largest favela in Brazil and one of the most developed, where around 100,000 people live. Notice that it goes right up against some very fancy looking high rises.

So what this model tells us is that in Latin American cities, not only do you have significant inequality but that inequality is starkly apparent on the landscape. You might connect it to the notion of relative deprivation used by social scientists to describe a person’s feeling of deprivation relative to other groups. If everyone in an area generally has a low income, you might not feel as impoverished as someone who has a very low income but lives in an area where people generally make a lot more. So again, it’s not just that Latin American countries often rank high in terms of economic inequality, but that that inequality is so clearly visible.

I think it’s also important to consider why these squatter settlements exist in the first place, because we’ll find slums in many of the other regions we’ll cover in this textbook. Often, we find slums where rural to urban migration has occurred at a very rapid pace, so rapid that it outpaces housing and job availability. In other words, as a society industrializes, and shifts from an agrarian system to an industrial one, fewer jobs are available or needed in rural areas, and residents move to the cities in search of work. In less developed or developing countries, a colonial system of development has often left them with only a small number of urban centers, so people flock to these urban centers in search of jobs. If a country is ill-equipped to handle this mass migration, there might not be enough housing or good paying jobs when they get there. In more developed Latin American countries, it is the affordable housing issue that is often the most critical. I find students mistakenly think that residents of slums don’t have jobs, but often they are employed and simply can’t find affordable housing.

Well done on Chapter 5! Don’t forget to go back to the chapter questions and test yourself!