LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN
Much attention has been given to the rapid growth in the world's urban population but rather less to the much larger and more fundamental economic, political and demographic changes that underlie it. Much of the attention has centred on cities in the South yet over the last ten to fifteen years, the scale and pace of urban change in parts of the North has also been rapid. Much attention has been given to the world's "mega-cities," yet the vast majority of the world's urban population (in both the North and the South) do not live in mega-cities. It is also commonly stated that large cities are "mushrooming" yet as Chapter 1 described, most of the major cities in both the North and the South have long histories as cities.
There is also a tendency to generalize about cities as if they have many characteristics in common and to describe and compare them with economic and demographic statistics. But each metropolitan area, city and market town is so much more than these statistics can reveal. As John Friedmann points out:
"In the economist's language, particular cities are dissolved into market configurations, their history is replaced by something called the urban dynamic, where people disappear as citizens of the polis and are subsumed under the categories of abstract urbanization processes, while human concerns are reduced to property, profits and competitive advantage."
Each urban centre has its own unique and complex ecological setting and political economy within which individuals, social groups, voluntary organizations, businesses and different government agencies co-exist, collaborate or compete. Within this context, so often, historic and contemporary factors collide - and generally, also local, national and international interests. This is not only the case in large cities but also in thousands of small urban centres. These are aspects rarely covered in Global Reports because generalizations are less easily made. The complexity and diversity of urban centres are revealed in their histories - but only for the small proportion of the world's urban centres whose history has been recorded. Social and cultural aspects of cities that have importance for their inhabitants also receive little attention.
This Chapter aims to bring out this diversity and to base the description of population and urbanization in the specific social and economic context of each of the world's major regions. Separate sections look at North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, West Europe, East and Central Europe and the 15 republics that were formerly the Soviet Union, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa. Each of these sections includes two primary focuses. The first is change in national populations - including their size, age structure and the role of international migration either in boosting or reducing populations. The second is changes in spatial distribution of population within national boundaries, including their distribution among metropolitan areas, cities, smaller urban centres and rural settlements. There is also a special interest in identifying trends during the 1980s and considering whether these represent continuations of trends evident in previous decades. There are certainly new urban trends that only become evident during the 1980s. There is also a special interest in considering what past and current trends imply for the future. Where possible, information is also given about trends in the early 1990s, although the fact that most data on population and urban change comes from censuses and most recent censuses were undertaken in 1990 and 1991 limits the amount of information available.