Almandoz A.-Urban Planning and Historiography L. A. - 43 Ver

Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81123
www.elsevier.com/locate/pplann
Review
Urban planning and historiography in Latin America*

Arturo Almandoz*
Departamento de Planificacion Urbana, Universidad Simon Bolvar, Edificio MEU, Piso 1, Apartado 89000,
Caracas 1086, Venezuela
Abbreviations AECI, Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional (Spanish Agency of International

Cooperation); AfP, Alianza para el Progreso (Alliance for Progress); ANPRM, Asociacion Nacional para la
Planificacion de la Republica Mexicana (National Association for the Planning of the Mexican Republic);
ANPUR, Associacao Nacional de Pos-graduacao e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional (National
Association of Graduate and Research Studies on Urbanism), Brazil; CEHOPU, Centro de Estudios Historicos de
Obras Publicas (Centre of Historical Studies of Public Works), Spain; CEE, Comision de Estetica Edilicia
(Commission of Building Aesthetic), Buenos Aires; CEUR, Centro de Estudios Urbanos (Centre of Urban
Studies), Buenos Aires; CIAM, Congre`s International dArchitecture Moderne (International Congress of
Modern Architecture); CIHE, Centro de Investigaciones Historicas y Esteticas (Centre of Historical and
Aesthetical Research), Caracas; CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American
Council of Social Sciences); CNU, Comision Nacional de Urbanismo (National Commission of Planning),
Venezuela; DGOPU, Direccion General de Obras Publicas y Urbanismo (General Direction of Public Works and
Urban Planning), Argentina; EC, European Community; ECLA, Economic Commission for Latin America; EFU,
Ecole Francaise dUrbanisme (French School of Town Planning); ENBA, Escola Nacional de Belas Artes
(National School of Fine Arts), Brazil; ETSAB, Escuela Tecnica de Arquitectura de Barcelona (Barcelonas
Technical School of Architecture), Spain; GEU, Grupo de Estudios Urbanos (Group of Urban Studies), Uruguay;
ICA, International Congresses of Americanists; IEAL, Instituto de Estudios de Administracion Local (Institute of
Local Administration Studies), Madrid; IMF, International Monetary Fund; ISPJAE, Jose Antonio Echeverra
Polytechnic Institute, Havana; JNP, Junta Nacional de Planificacion (National Board of Planning), Cuba; OAS,
Organization of American States; RNIU, Red Nacional de Investigacion Urbana (National Network of Urban
Research), Mexico; SFU, Societe Francaise des Urbanistes (French Association of Town Planners); SIAP,
Sociedad Interamericana de Planificacion (Inter-American Society of Planning); UBA, University of Buenos
Aires; UCCI, Union de Ciudades Capitales Iberoamericanas (Union of Iberian Americas Capital Cities); UDF,
University of the Federal District, Mexico; UNR, National University of Rosario, Argentina; URM, University
Reform Movement (Movimiento de Reforma Universitaria), Argentina; WB, World Bank.
*
This article is drawn from a postdoctoral research about Latin Americas urban historiography, developed by the
author at the Centro de Investigaciones Posdoctorales (CIPOST), Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas.
Under the title The Transfer and Shaping of Urban Historiography in Mid-20th century Latin America, a
preliminary version was presented at the 11th Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS).
Planning Models and the Culture of Cities. Barcelona: 1417 July, 2004.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: C58 212 906 4037; Fax: C58 212 906 4040/551 2547.
E-mail address: almandoz@usb.ve
0305-9006/$ - see front matter q 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.progress.2006.02.002
82
A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81123
1
Introduction
From the 1990s, especially after a seminal article by Jorge Hardoy (1988, 1990) about
Latin Americas importation of Europes urban theories from 1850 through 1930, the
study of urban transfer into that region has been mainly focused on the contribution by
foreign visitors and their proposals of urban design from the early 20th century. Beyond
the scope of this relatively recent agenda, if the process is regarded in a more
comprehensive way, other variables and aspects of that cultural transference emerge as
equally interesting. This is the case of famous visitors contributions to local academic
contexts, as well as the influence that foreign books and schools had in the consolidation of
Latin Americas urban-related agenda, including urban and planning history. Although,
some steps have been taken to map out the continents architectural historiography
(Gutierrez, 1997; Torre, 2002), apart from national case studies, the emergence of
planning history remains unexplored from a continental perspective. Departing from but
going beyond the mere importation involved in this process of disciplinary differentiation,
this article aims at identifying books and academic changes that, in the context of
pioneers reforms and specialists events, help to explain how planning history was shaped
and consolidated in Latin America from the 1930s through the 1990s. As a parallel pursuit,
it will be considered how these discursive formation of historiography took place amidst
political, economic, social and demographic changes, completed with practical shifts in
urbanism and regional planning.
The theoretical formation to be pursued in this article relies on the book as a discursive
unit throughout which epistemological relationships can be traced. I am aware of the
objections pointed out by Foucault regarding the questionable use of unites de discours,
such as the notions of continuity (tradition, development, influence, evolution, mentality,
spirit), the vague entity of books and works, as well as the contested separations between
disciplines, among other epistemological stratagems upon which discursive regularities
have been established, mostly in social sciences. However, I still believe that the author of
Larcheologie du savoir (1969) well demonstrated that the blurred borders of the little
parallelepiped that the book is, whose figure and definition changes from the very
moment when it is twisted in our hands, enables us to adopt it as a thread for this search.
For, as Foucault pointed out: The margins of a book are never either well-defined or clearcut: beyond the title, the first lines and the final period; beyond its internal configuration
and the shape that makes it autonomous, the book is involved in a system of reference to
other books, to other texts, to other phrases: node within a network (Foucault, 1992:
3334).1 Adopted in the postdoctoral research this article is drawn from, this bookish
emphasis lies at the same time on an epistemological conception, ranging from Hayden
1
My translation of: Cest que les marges dun livre ne sont jamais nettes ni rigoureusement tranchees: par-dela` le
titre, les premie`res lignes et le point final, par-dela` sa configuration interne et la forme qui lautonomise, il est pris
dans un syste`me de renvois a` dautres livres, dautres textes, dautres phrases: nud dans un reseau.
83
White and Michel de Certeau through Paul Ricoeur, according to which history is mainly a
literary artifice (Ricoeur, 1991, III: 287).
That nodal condition of the book thus enables us to adopt it as an operative category
throughout this historical quest. Although they may sometimes be drawn from fields other
than urbanism and planning, the books referred to and consulted here made specific and
significant contributions to the historical study of Latin Americas city and urbanization,
urbanism and planning. But beyond their texts, the corpus of books considered mirror a
complex of relationships with Latin Americas urban and social contexts, academic
changes and professional practice of the discipline, all of which can be regarded as
variables or epistemological factors that the article aims at putting together. Also assuming
the fact that some planning movements and statements have oriented the historical
narrative (Hebbert and Sonne, 2004), the meaning of books and other theoretical variables
is to be contextualized and set in perspective with the influence that some changes of the
professional practice of urban planning has had in shaping the agenda of historiography.2
Considering that the two trends of urban and planning history are not so
differentiated in Latin America as in Britain and the United States, the discursive
formation to be reviewed in this article often intertwines the historiography of the main
objects of those variants: city and urbanization, urbanism and planning. I have tried
elsewhere to sketch out that distinction, basically assuming that, in the Latin American
context, historia urbana relates to the city as both a social and spatial form, as well as to
the process of urbanization, whereas the historia urbanstica deals with the constitution of
the discipline and practical ways of shaping and modifying the urban settlement and space
(Almandoz, 2003a,b,c,d, 2004a,b). But it is not a distinction that can be maintained in this
article, where most of the references and rationale of analysis ultimately relate to the
history of planning and the way it has been enriched by institutional changes in the
national, professional and academic grounds. In this respect, it can be said that, instead of
the dichotomy between urban and planning history, the articles mainstream moves along
planning history as a sub-discipline of planning or urbanism, and history of planning as a
subject matter within planning history. But this will not prevent us from occasionally using
the term urban history, in a rather generic sense, to imply the how the processes of the
city and urbanization have been dealt with.
The sequence of the article reviews some stagesresulting from the combination of the
discursive variables and factors mentioned above. After identifying some antecedents
from historical geography, art history and social sciences, the itinerary starts by reviewing
the influence of the 1930s visits to the continent of famous urbanists who were
representative of different trends of the emerging discipline. The feature of this inaugural
moment of urbanism is sought in the close relationship between evolutionism and
morphology, what was mirrored in early texts, events and authors that underpinned the
eventual constitution of planning history as a subject matter. Following a chronological
order, but without intending to provide a historical account of the period, the second
episode is framed within Latin Americas developmental modernization after the second
world war, which ran parallel to the shift from European-oriented urbanismo towards US2
It is something that Sutcliffe (2003), for instance, has reconstructed for the British context.
84
influenced planificacion. In the heyday of vernacular modernisms, the emergence of a

more specialized historiography is explained as a result of Latin Americas adoption of
international agendas of modernization, completed by the exchange of regional scholars
with other nuclei in Europe and North America. After the failure of developmental
modernization, a third episode is differentiated by the shift of Latin Americas social
sciences towards the predominantly-Marxist School of Dependence, whose structuralism
often obliterated the spatial and territorial references that are essential to planning history.
In the midst of neo-liberal reforms, the fourth episode looks at the reinsertion of space and
the emergence of a new morphology, resulting not only from the post-modern relationship
between architecture and urbanism, but also by the invigorated interaction between the
Iberian and Latin American blocs.
Throughout all those episodes, the ways in which these academic approaches to theory
and history influenced or were influenced by the practice of the discipline stand out as an
epistemological feature that, besides confirming the mutual dependence between the two
domains of theory and practice, help to explain at the same time some of the peculiarities
and biases of Latin Americas urban historiography. Particularly revealing in this respect
are to be the interviews with two major historians of the region, Roberto Segre and Ramon
Gutierrez, (Almandoz, 2003a, 2004a), whose testimonies become here fundamental pieces
of primary information for this articles reconstruction of the main episodes of Latin
Americas planning historiography.
85
2
Urbanismo, morphology and evolutionism
2.1. Early urbanization and populism
By 1920, Latin Americas most advanced regions boasted two citizens per each peasant
that had remained in the backward pampas, llanos or sertao of their vast countryside. This
is of course a gross indicator that camouflages a sharply contrastive reality, as most of
what has to do with this continent, in which Argentina and the Southern Cone had more
than 50% of its population urbanized since 1914, whereas Andean or Central American
countries were predominantly rural until the 1950s (Beyhaut, 1985: 210211). In spite of
its relative simplification, demographic indicators mirror, though, an unmistakable reality:
triggered since the very beginning of the 20th century in some republics, the process of
urbanization would spiral in most of Latin America in the second third of the century.
Though only in demographic terms, in a few decades was completed a cycle that had taken
more than 100 years in Britain and other nations industrialized and urbanized throughout
the 19th century (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 911).
As in other regions of todays so-called third world, the speedy pace of Latin Americas
20th-century urbanization intensified concentrations within a map of contrast with rural
backwardness and dispersion. Flooded with both foreign and rural-to-urban immigration,
former colonial capitals and new centres rapidly reached magnitudes which rivalled
European and North American metropolises. Buenos Aires jumped from 663 000 people
in 1895 to 2 178 000 in 1932; Santiago from 333 000 in 1907 to 696 000 in 1930; and
Mexico city from 328 000 in 1908 to 1 049 000 in 1933. As a dramatic case comparable to
the growth of industrial cities like Manchester and Chicago, Sao Paulo spiralled from
240 000 inhabitants in 1900 to 579 000 in 1920, and 1 075 000 in 1930, while the urban
primacy of Rio was diminished, its population increasing from only 650 000 in 1895 to
811 433 in 1906. The expansion of the capitals was partly due to an incipient process of
industrialization that accelerated urbanization in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Cuba,
which figured among the worlds most urbanized countries at the time of the Depression in
1930. Havanas population had jumped from 250 000 inhabitants by the turn of the century
to 500 000 in 1925. Mainly fuelled by rural-to-urban migration, other capitals of the
Andean countries also grew considerably: Bogota went from 100 000 people in 1900 to
330 000 in 1930, while Lima increased from 104 000 in 1891 to 273 000 in 1930.
Although Caracas rose only from 72 429 inhabitants in 1891 to 92 ,212 in 1920, the first
effects of the oil boom pushed the population from 135 253 in 1926 to 203 342 in 1936
(Hardoy, 1990: 22; Almandoz, 2002: 21).
Not always reaching the drama of the Mexican revolution in 1910which had been
partly unleashed by the oblivion of the feudal-like countryside under the modernizing
governments of Porfirio Daz (18771880, 18841911)Latin American states could not
stretch to the 20th century the liberalism and positivism of the nineteenth, as the Porfiriato
had tried to do. Challenged by demands in terms of universal suffrage, constitutions of
unions and other political rights, the governments of Jose Batlle y Ordonez (19031907,
86
19111915) in Uruguay, Roque Saenz Pena (19101913) and Hipolito Yrigoyen (1916
1922) in Argentina exemplified early attempts to adjust the emerging populism to the
demands of rapid urbanization. Most of the claims of the heterogeneous masa that grew in
the metropolises had to do with problems faced by the urban mass in terms of
accommodation and sanitary conditions in volatile cities that could no longer maintain, for
political and demographic reasons alike, their post-colonial shortages in services and
infrastructure (Romero, 1984; Pineo and Baer, 1998).
Official and private answers to those demands would configure the agenda of the two
first decades of the 20th century, especially in terms of hygienic and housing reforms of
the historic centres, as well as the design of suburban residences for an increasingly
cosmopolitan bourgeoisie (Almandoz, 2002: 2831). Flirting, on the one hand, with early
samples of the International Style and Art Deco imported for their lavish villas in the posh
barrios of Buenos Aires or Sao Paulo, this snobbish clientele of newly-urbanized
hacendados and coffee barons was still keen, on the other hand, on a more academic
repertoire inherited from the Belle Epoque, ranging from Beaux Arts to Art Nouveau. It
was an ambivalence of architectural taste that the public sector also evinced in their
programmes of administrative or civic buildings, as it had been manifested in the 1910s
celebrations of the first centenary of Latin American republics.
In the midst of this scene of piecemeal reforms and eclectic changes, urbanism was not
institutionalized until the 1920s. But unlike European countries where the consolidation of
planning was strongly associated with the passing of legislation, either on the national or
local levels, Latin Americas urbanismo was to be proclaimed by new plans for the major
cities, which served as manifestoes or birth certificates of the new discipline.
2.2. Local and foreign experts
By the late 1920s, industrial growth, demographic mobility and urban sprawl evinced the
necessity of Latin Americas major capitals to adopt plans, which were undertaken by local
governments relying on both foreign experts and new generations of native professionals.
Confirming the specialization of the discourse and the discipline that had accompanied the
emergence of urbanism in industrialized countries, the urban agenda gained room in technical
journals and magazines that were published during the first decades of the 20th century.
Among them stood out La Ciudad (1929) in Buenos Aires; Planificacion (1927) and Casas
(1935) in Mexico; Ciudad y Campo in Lima; zig-zag and Urbanismo y Arquitectura (1939) in
Chile; El Cojo Ilustrado, Revista Tecnica del Ministerio de Obras Publicas and Revista
Municipal del Distrito Federal (1939) in Caracas (Fig. 1). The influence of European maestros
was still evident in the widespread use of books by Camillo Sitte, Marcel Poete, Pierre
Lavedan and Raymond Unwin, among others that were translated or circulated in their
original versions among Latin American professionals (Almandoz, 2002).3
Besides the Inter-American Conferences and Pan-American Congresses of Architects
that took place since the 1920s, technical innovations in urbanism were exchanged at
3
The following paragraphs are drawn from the review in this chapter, where some other specific bibliography in
Spanish or Portuguese can be found. Only some references in English are included here.
87
international events that, from the following decade, were focused on diverse components
of the emerging field. Chile held a national congress on architecture and urbanism in 1934,
and the first international Congreso de Urbanismo (Congress of Urbanism) was held in
Buenos Aires in 1935; later on, the first Congreso Interamericano de Municipalidades
(Inter-American Congress of Municipalities) took place in Havana in 1938, and the second
in Santiago in 1941. In relation to housing, the first Congreso Panamericano de Vivienda
Popular (Pan-American Congress of low-cost housing) also took place in Buenos Aires in
1939, and the 16th International Congress on Planning and Housing was held in Mexico
City in 1938. Celebrated in Washington the following year, the 15th International
Congress of Architects also represented a distinct opportunity for Latin American
professionals to update and exchange their experiences (Hardoy, 1988: 99100, 123126).
Confirming the importance that administrative changes had for the consolidation of
planningas had happened in industrial countries before 1914Latin Americas
planning machinery did not take shape until the second half of the 1920s, when urban
problems became a public issue of administrative regulation. Most of the national or
municipal offices of urban planning in Santiago, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City,
Rio, Sao Paulo, Lima, Bogota and Caracas were a joint effort among local and national
governments, new professional associations, and urban research centres. Some acting at
the same time as administrative heads, urban designers and promoters, an indigenous
generation of de facto urbanistas would emerge from these offices in charge of elaborating
the inaugural plans for the emerging metropolises. There were included Carlos Contreras
in Mexico City, Mauricio Cravotto in Montevideo, Carlos della Paolera in Buenos Aires,
Francisco Prestes Maia and Anhaia Mello in Sao Paulo, Pedro Martnez Inclan in Havana,
and Leopoldo Martnez Olavarra and Carlos Raul Villanueva in Caracas.
As a belated expression of the inter-war colonialism in Latin America, which was still
seduced by the old worlds cultural and academic prestige, the new offices of urbanism,
though boasting teams that already were professionally mature, hired famous experts from
Europe, either as advisors or coordinators of the plans to be produced. The new
instruments seemed to reach the value of manifestoes or birth certificates of the emerging
discipline, unlike European countries where the first planning laws had more
epistemological significance. Still capitalizing on the prestige of the eclectic side of
French urbanism in Belle-Epoque Latin America, conspicuous representatives of the socalled Ecole Francaise dUrbanisme (EFU) were invited to participate in proposals and
plans for some capitals. In 1924 Jean-Claude Nicholas Forestier visited Buenos Aires,
where some of his ideas, inspired by the city beautiful, were incorporated into the first
Organic Project elaborated by the Comision de Estetica Edilicia (CEE, Commission of
Building Aesthetic), created for the Argentine capital in 1925. By then, Forestiers Plan
para el Embellecimiento y Ensanche de La Habana (Plan for the Beautification and
Enlargement of Havana) was published and included in the Ley de Obras Publicas (Act of
Public Works) issued by Gerardo Machados new government (19251931).
The Beaux-Arts tradition seemed to renew and enlarge its repertoire during Leon
Jausselys visit to Montevideo in 1926, when the founder of the Societe Francaise des
Urbanistes (SFU) manifested his opposition to the colonial grid and his preference for the
introduction of some garden city principles in relation to urban expansion (Gutierrez,
2002: 6466). Invited by the Prefect Antonio Prado Junior to coordinate a technical team
88
between 1926 and 1930, Donat-Alfred Agache masterminded a plan for Rio, which was a
methodological model with many geographical surveys and an informative synthesis of
the sprawling capital (Pereira, 2002: 98102). A belated example of the EFUs eclectic
tradition can be found in the first plan for Caracas (1939), drawn up by the Directorate of
Urbanism of the capitals Federal District. Since, the creation of the latter in 1937, the
team of local experts had been boosted by the advice of the Paris-based office of Henri
Prost, whose junior associates, Jacques Lambert and Maurice Rotival, were sent to
Caracas to coordinate the plan (Gonzalez, 2002: 233237; Hein, 2002). The French
advisers combined most of the ingredients of the EFU, which made possible the final
arrival of Haussmannesque surgery to the Venezuelan capital, after several decades of
Frenchified aspirations in its urban culture (Almandoz, 1999: 8591).
An alternative message of modernity is what South Americans tried to get from inviting
Le Corbusier to visit Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Sao Paulo and Rioa tour undertaken in
1929, while the second Congre`s International dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM) took place
in Frankfurt. Meanwhile, more professional representatives of the German-speaking world
were also welcomed to foster the emerging urbanism of Latin America. Werner
Hegemann, who edited Der Stadtebau, was invited to Buenos Aires in 1931, where he was
hosted by Los Amigos de la Ciudad (The Friends of the City), a pragmatic society which
was not satisfied with either the EFUs academic proposals or Le Corbusiers prefabricated
plans. The man responsible for Hegemanns invitation was della Paolera, who had
graduated at the Institut dUrbanisme. Since, his Parisian years, the Argentine engineer
was acquainted with the ideas of the Musee Social and the SFU, but also knew of
Hegemanns combined scientific and humanist approach to planning (Collins, 1995). It
was also the case of the Austrian Karl Brunner (Fig. 2), whose long sojourns in Santiago
and Bogota confirmed him as the most conspicuous representative in Latin America of a
rationalist and contextualized Stadtebau pursued by some professionals in the aftermath of
Sittes aestheticism.
2.3. Legal, professional and academic milestones
In the midst of the administrative and technical changes that accompanied the first
offices and plans of urbanism, the institutional consolidation through university courses,
professional associations and exchanges in events were all early inputs for the eventual
emergence of planning historiography. Without pretending to thoroughly register the
consolidation of each Latin American countrywhat would be impossible not only
because of the extension limits of this article but also due to a bibliography for case studies
that is barely beginning to appearlet us just identify milestones that signalled the
maturity of some national milieus from the 1920s onwards.
One of the first courses of urbanismo was introduced in 1928 at the School of
Architecture of the University of Chiles Faculty of Economic Sciences and Mathematics,
by Alberto Schade Pohlenz, author of a 1923 plan for Santiago (Fig. 3); strongly
influenced by Sittes aesthetics, his syllabus inspired a similar programme at the Catholic
University in 1929 (Hofer, 2003: 7475). With the foundation of the Institute of Urbanism
and the issue of a Ley General de Construcciones y Urbanizaciones (General Law of
Buildings and Urban Developments) in the same year, followed by the celebration of the
89
first congress of Architecture and Urbanism in 1934, the country convulsed by then with
Arturo Alessandris reforms, stood out, though, as one of the most articulate platforms of
Latin Americas urbanism. After the departure of Brunner, who developed urban plans,
law proposals and university courses, his chair would be taken over until 1946 by his
disciple, Rodulfo Armando Oyarzun Philippi, while other fronts of his activity were
continued by other members of the first generation of Chilean urbanistas (Pavez, 1992:
23).
Post-revolutionary Mexico was another milieu early matured, boosted by the
lvaro Obregon (19201924)
technocratic reforms launched during the presidencies of A
and Plutarco E. Calles (19241928). Promoted by the architect Manuel Ortiz Monasterio,
the course City Planning and Civic Art was inaugurated in 1926 at the National School of
Fine Arts. Jose Luis Cuevas Pietrasanta was in charge of it until 1929, when it was taken
over by Carlos Contreras, founder of the Planificacion journal, while Cuevas introduced a
similar programme at the Autonomous University. Led by the Asociacion Nacional para la
Planificacion de la Republica Mexicana (ANPRM, National Association for the Planning
of the Mexican Republic), the celebration of the first national conference on this subject in
1930, as well as the passing of a general law on planning in the same year, confirm
Mexicos pioneering development of a professional and legal groundwork. A campaigner
of this professionalization, Contreras endeavoured to create a faculty of planning that
would certify students in three years; even though this initiative was not carried out, a
graduate programme on Urbanism and Planning was created, as early as 1939, at the
National Polytechnic Institutes High School of Engineering, probably the first in Latin
America (Sanchez Ruiz, 2002).
Though some changes were undermined by political instability and the later consolidation
of Getulio Vargass Estado Novo (New State, 19371945), whose authoritarian centralism
did not seem to encourage local but national reforms, also Brazil showed advanced signs of
administrative, professional and academic institutionalization of urbanism. After the creation
of the short-lived National Association of Urbanism in 1927, another step towards its
institutionalization as a national matter was marked by the 1932 Department of Municipal
Administration, aimed at providing assistance to local governments. Confirming that the
prefects of Brazilian cities have often been renown experts in addition to public servants, Luiz
de Anhaia Mello (Fig. 4)author of Problemas de urbanismo (1929)organized in Sao
Paulo a Congress of Housing, followed by a week of Urbanism in Salvador de Bahia in 1935.
The carioca academia witnessed Lucio Costas 1931 reform of the Escola Nacional de Belas
Artes (ENBA, National School of Fine Arts), including courses of urbanism and landscape
within a curricular framework intended to make the teaching of architecture independent from
plastic arts. Later on, the prefect Pedro Ernesto would achieve the creation of the University of
the Federal District (UDF), where a first graduate programme on urbanismo was imparted
until the university was closed by Vargass regime in 1939 (Pereira, 2003: 7980).
In the case of Argentina, after the creation of the CEE in 1925, the interest of
architectural for urbanism was evinced in the above-referred invitations to Le Corbusier
and Hegemann; the latters proposals were promoted from the Office of the Plan created in
1932. If the maturity of the professional milieu made possible the celebration of the first
Congress of Urbanism in 1935, an equivalent course at Rosarios Universidad del Litoral
90
had been pioneered from 1929 by della Paolera (Fig. 5), who in 1933 took on a similar
course at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) (Randle, 1977: 12).
Among the foreign maestros whose contributions reached greater academic influence,
it was Brunner who not only consolidated the professional and institutional platforms of
Chile and Colombia, but also managed to produce a textbook where regional seeds of
planning history can be recognized. Published in Bogota in two volumes, Brunners
Manual de urbanismo (19391940, Fig. 6) provided a review of the solutions that the
emerging planning gave to the functional problems of world metropolises, with many
examples drawn from Latin Americas fast-growing cities. Based on the authors 1924
course at Viennas National Faculty of Architecture, recommended in turn as model at
Heidelbergs 1928 Congress of Urbanism, the manual aimed at comprehending the
scientific system of the discipline, comprising politicalsociological, technical and
artistic components, the latter of which included the history of urban art (Brunner, 1939,
I: 19, 24).
Before addressing the questions that a professional of his generation considered as
science of urbanismhousing, sanitation, buildings, roads, traffic and underground
networksBrunner structured a historical chapter about the evolution of the modern
discipline. Looking at John Ruskin as one of the first to detect the whole loss of the
aesthetic and artistic tradition that had been prompted by the industrial revolution,
Brunner singled out Sitte as the continuator of the Stadtebau tradition, which had
addressed itself to the re-conquest of the artistic dogmas of past urbanism (Brunner,
1939, I: 1318). Ruskins and Sittes historicist descent would be related to the reformist
task carried on by Raymond Unwin and Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who approached the
external aspect of cities, striving to gain anew a general understanding of the field of urban
art, on the basis of the lessons taught by historical buildings. In spite of the gap between
this picturesque tradition and his more functional manual, Brunner seems to have aligned
himself with the alleged reformism of this trend, especially by comparison with the other
two identified. These were, on the one hand, the Beaux-Arts School, which, though
sometimes exhibiting a confusion of architectural expressions and an exaggeration in
decoration, did not lose a continuity that, jointly with the impact of Haussmanns works
the school was associated with, made it reach a persistent influence in American
metropolises. On the other hand, as a third trend and component alike of the technique of
urbanism, Brunner identified the art of Landscape Architecture, originally English but
then developed by John Nolen at Harvard University (Brunner, 1939, I: 1517).4
By grouping and synthesizing the trends that allegedly accounted for the evolution of
contemporary urbanismnamely a historicist Stadtebau related to the English town
planning, the Haussmannian Beaux-Arts and a landscape architecture coming from the
city beautifulBrunner recomposed traditions that, in spite of the noticeable absence of
CIAMs already-consolidated presence, informed most of the palette that coloured Latin
My translation drawn from: enfocando el aspecto exterior de las ciudades, empenandose en reconquistar un
entendimiento general en el campo del arte urbano, a base de la ensenanza resguardada en los monumentos
historicos.
91
Americas first urban plans. And he also offered to Latino urbanistas the first historical
approach to the novel discipline from the standpoint of the practice of planning.
2.4. Morphological ingredients: history of art and evolutionism
In addition to the institutionalization of urbanismo as a professional and an academic
field, the eventual emergence of urban morphology and planning history in Latin America
can only be explained by considering other academic inputs, which ultimately link to the
historiography of art and architecture. Unlike countries like Britain and the United States,
where urban history derived from economic and social mainstreams, history of art seems
to have provided a first substratum for Latin Americas urban history, what makes it closer
to Italys early morphology (Zucconi, 2002). Encouraged by the Pan-American congresses
of architecture, held from 1924 onwards, Argentinas Martn Noel and Mario Buschiazzo,
Perus Emilio Harth-Terre and Mexicos Manuel Touissant published, from the late 1920s,
a series of works on Hispanic Americas history of art and architecture. Among the
periodicals that provided a platform for that first group of art historians was the University
of Mexicos Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas from 1937, followed by the
UBAs Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Esteticas, from 1948. The
endeavours of these art historians brought about a first set of morphological studies
focused on the colonial dameros (checkerboards) and later ensanches (expansions) of
Mexico City (1938), Buenos Aires (1940), Montevideo (1944), Lima (1945), Havana
(19451946) and Guatemala city (1948). Going beyond the antiquarian standpoint, in
most of those studies the isolated building and its morphology are no longer the sole
concern of the art historian (Palm, 1968: 22, 2627). On this morphological and artistic
platform, Stanislavsky (1947, 1950) and Kubler (1962, 1968) kept on working, from the
United States, on the subject of colonial architecture and urbanism in Hispanic America,
while Oskar Jurgens and E. Palm did the same from Germany.
Also Spain made a significant contribution to the historiography of Latin Americas art and
architecture. After Sevilles Iberian American Exhibition in 1922, which seems to have
revived the peninsulas interest for the artistic expressions of its former colonies, the
notebooks on Arte en America y Filipinas appeared from 1935. Published by the Spanish
Diego Angulo Inguez between 1933 and 1939, the Archivo de Indias collection of colonial
plans was followed by the mammoth Historia del arte hispanoamericano (19451956), edited
by Angulo Inguez jointly with Enrique Marco Dorta and Mario Buschiazzo, whose volumes
referred to colonial layouts of Latin American capitals. It is also worth noticing the
considerable treatment given to the city in general encyclopaedias such as the Histoire
generale des civilizations (19531961), coordinated by Maurice Crouzet, which was
translated into Spanish and Portuguese almost immediately (Crouzet, 1960, 1961, 1960
1965,). As Segre remembers, these reference works provided an early and stimulant input for
young generations to realize the necessity of the field of urban historiography in Latin America
(Almandoz, 2003a: 201). Their enthusiasm would be boosted by the publication of archival
collections of local or national scope, such as the plans of old Buenos Aires by Taullard, maps
of Colombia by Carlos Martnez, and Portugals by Silveira (Almandoz, 2004: 244).
Beyond the enthusiasm for the publication of archival plans and the awareness of artistic
and architectural heritage, the concern for the evolution of the citys form and organism, in the
92
way announced by the founders of Frances modern urban historiography, was also present in
Latin America since the 1940s. Partly relying on the Nietschean biologism of Spenglers
morphological history, books such as Marcel Poetes Introduction a` lurbanisme: lEvolution
des villes (1929) and Pierre Lavedans Geographie des villes (1936), unfolded an evolutionist
yet less-degenerative explanation of the city as a living organism subject to cycles (Poete,
1958; Lavedan, 1959). Both the palaeographer and the geographer intertwined different types
of sources, with special reference to maps, plans and other documents depicting the citys
form and image. Beyond their explicative contribution within the theoretical and historical
domain of urbanisme, such treatises made use of some of the practical tools that started to be
systematically used by town and regional planning, as it had been advocated by Patrick
Geddes in Cities in Evolution (1915), another antecedent of that first generation of French
urban historiography (Almandoz, 2003c: 6567). The practicality of the historical search
would be epitomized by Gaston Bardet, Poetes disciple and son-in-law, whose Lurbanisme
(1945) catalogued old forms of post-Renaissance urban art to underpin the bases of urbanism
as a scientific discipline (Bardet, 1967: 1015).
If Geddes never came to be historically influential in Latin America, where it was
belatedly translated into Spanish in a series about housing and planning (Geddes, 1960,
Fig. 7), the French concern for the evolution of urban form had been long since shared by
Latino planners, even to a greater extent than their North American counterparts had. This
was one of the clearest post-cards included in Violichs Cities of Latin America (1944)
both a travel and technical book that presented, to the US public, the first overview of the
urban panorama and planning trends southwards of the Bravo river. When meeting some
of the local colleagues on his 19411942 journey, the Californian planner noticed that
Latin professionals were European-trained, or prepared for the technical field in their own
country by European-trained professors. In addition to their thorough technicality, Latin
professionals frequently had a broader understanding of their own and related fields than
would be provided in similar training in the United States. More than their North
American colleagues, Latin urbanistas also tended to philosophize about the significance
of the citys pattern, about the broad human objective of planning. Knowing European
capitals by heart, most of the planners Violich talked to were still influenced by the
historical orientation of French urbanism, epitomized in books such as Poetes Paris. Son
evolution creatrice (1938), which the visitor came across in some of the planners private
libraries (Violich, 1944: 158, 169, 173; Almandoz, 2002: 39).
Brunners influential Manual de urbanismo also confirmed the penetration of
evolutionist ideas in Latin Americas professional milieus, as it was pointed out in
relation to his conception of the trends of the discipline As of the structure of his work, the
author stated that history of the cities had significant importance in the first part, focused
on urban evolution, as well as in the third, devoted to the urban art or urbanization
(Brunner, 1939, I: 2425). Only a year after the appearance of Mumfords The Culture of
Cities (1938),5 Brunners manual also picked up its ideainherited in turn from Geddes
and the French evolutionistsregarding the determination of the 20th centurys urban
agenda by the problems of the industrial city. In this respect, Brunner pointed out the
5
Translated into Spanish almost twenty years later (Mumford, 1957).
93
disjointed image of the metropolis from the second half of the 19th century, which
evinced that the humanity lost the sense of continuity in its gradual cultural progress,
making mistakes whose consequences were disastrous for the advance of human
civilization (Brunner, 19391940, I: 1315).6
This critical historicism regarding the contemporary metropolis was to some extent
indicativeas Violich noticed during his tripof the generalized influence that
evolutionism had in Latin Americas professional culture by the time when urbanismo
was being shaped as a discipline.
But Brunners leading role and compromises as practitioner and international adviser
seems to have prevailed over the gloomy evolutionism for his final adoption of a more
optimistic position regarding the feasible consolidation of a both scientific and practical
discipline. The apprehensions concerning the industrial metropolis did not prevent him
from developing numerous projects in Austria, Chile and Colombia, as we know. Ranging
from urban plans to satellite towns and working-class housing aligned with the social
concerns of the Baupolitik tradition, in some of those projects Brunner borrowed from the
modernist models he also criticized (Hofer, 2003).
Also in Argentina, from Carlos Mara Moraless 1900s writings through the CEEs
1925 plan for Buenos Aires, a notion of urban evolution sought to synthesize, in a
preliminary and operative way, the historical components reckoned as necessary for the
planning or design of the project, trying at the same time to legitimise the discipline as
such (Novick, 2003: 1012). Mainly drawn from Lavedan, this evolutionist approach of a
morphological history was led by Carlos Mara della Paolera, coordinator of the capitals
Plan Regulador since 1932. Not only in the case of Buenos Aires, his participation in the
plans for other Argentine and Uruguayan cities mirrored his preference for a science of
the plans that combined lesprit geometrique of the urban form with the evolution of its
organism (Randle, 1977: 19).
The evolutionist concern that for so long had been shared by Argentinas urbanistas was
finally rewarded with the arrival of the French maestros. Invited by della Paolera, who had
been his disciple at the Institute of Urbanism, in 1948 Poete inaugurated at the UBA a
version of his Parisian course under the same title: Evolution des agglomerations
humaines.
After another invitation by della Paolera, also Bardet lectured in Brazils Belo
Horizonte and in Buenos Aires, where he lived for a year in the late 1940s and taught more
instrumental than historical courses (Randle, 1972: 3233). In the midst of curricular
changes rapidly taking place in Argentine universities since the University Reform
Movement (URM) initiated in 1918,7 the symbiosis between these foreign urbanistes and
local pioneers represented an early expression of a comprehensive practice where history
of art and evolutionism came together in their concern for the urban form and organism,
thus providing foundations for historiography and planning at the same time.
6
My translation of: la humanidad perdio el sentido de continuidad en su progreso cultural paulatino, para incurrir
en errores cuyas consecuencias fueron desastrosas para el progreso de la civilizacion humana.
7
Spread from Cordoba to other Argentine and Latin American universities, the URM called for democratic
reforms and for the cultivation of the indigenous spirit as opposed to the materialist attitudes fostered by the
export-economy operated by the liberal elites (Williamson, 1992: 318).
94
So even though pioneers such as Brunner and della Paolera are not especially known for
their work on historiography, it can be noted that, on the one hand, they seemed to follow
the examples of Geddes, Poete and Bardet, who had early shown an interest for linking the
urban evolution with the professional town planning and civic studies. On the other, they
epitomized an epistemological moment in which the historical conception of the first
urbanistas, not yet planners as such, was marked by some morphology and evolutionism
that influenced, though did not determine, practical orientations. Albeit for more
professional than aesthetic purposes, Brunner and della Paolera still looked for old forms
for new plans, as it had happened in the academic tradition that they tried to leave behind.
95
3
Developmentalism, modernism and planning
3.1. Imbalance between industrialization and urbanization
More than a half of the population of Uruguay (78.0), Argentina (65.3), Chile (58.4)
and Venezuela (53.2) already lived in urban centres by 1950. While Latin Americas
average percentage of urbanization was still 41.6, some other countries such as Brazil and
Mexico were not demographically urban because of their huge populations, but boasted
long since some of the worlds greatest metropolises (United Nations, 1996: 47). Mexico
City and Rio de Janeiro were just below and above 3 million, respectively, while Sao Paulo
had already spiralled to 2.5 million. This first rank of Latin Americas metropolitan areas
was still led by the Great Buenos Aires, which amounted to 4.7 million (Harris, 1971: 167)
From the end of the second world war until the mid-1960s, Latin Americas biggest
countries showed a relative prosperity, marked by significant economic expansion amidst
sustained urbanization. Fuelled by the massive markets targeted by the import substitution
industrialization (ISI), Brazil and Mexico reached a yearly growth of 6% , what made them
look as model economies on the eve of taking off towards development, in terms of
Rostows phases (Rostow, 1990). Even though the Southern Cone countries had been
more dynamic in the inter-war period, they still maintained a level of growth about 4%
(Clichevsky, 1990: 2223). Meanwhile, epitomized by the windfall of oil-producer
Venezuela, the surplus yielded by the export of raw materials financed a second generation
of ISI also in Colombia and Peru, in all which the rate of industrial growth almost doubled
that of the primary sector (Williamson, 1992: 334335).
The modernizing climate was imbued with an economic nationalism that was shared by
Latin Americas socialism and liberalism alike. It ranged from the populist regimes of
Mexicos Lazaro Cardenas (19341940), Argentinas Juan D. Peron (19461955) and
Brazils Getulio Vargas, to the progressive yet brutal dictatorships of Cubas Fulgencio
Batista (19401944, 19521959) and Venezuelas Marcos Perez Jimenez (19521958).
Their common agenda of desarrollismo (developmentalism) was backed since 1948 by
the creation of international agencies such as the Organization of American States (OAS)
and the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), both sponsored by the United
Nations (UN) and the USAs growing interest in the regions primary and industrial
exploitation. Headquartered in Santiago de Chile and led by Raul Prebischformer
director general of Argentinas Central Bankthe ECLA was a cornerstone of Latin
Americas post-war developmentalism, aimed at implemmenting ISI and other economic
policies that consolidated the corporate state in industrializing countries until the mid1960s, when the easy phase of ISI would be over (Williamson, 1992: 338339).8
8
I wish to acknowledge the comments of one of the readers of the first version of this article submitted to Planning in
Progress, who stressed the importance of developmentalismthe English term is taken from him or herduring the
first phase of ECLA. Following Williamsons interpretation (1992: 333), I previously tended to directly associate
ECLA with the critical thinking of the School of Dependence, which would emerge later, as we shall see.
96
Initially regarded as promising examples of developing countriesa category that

seemed to have great resonance until the 1960smost of Latin Americas industrializing
societies were supposed to be exponents of the classic theory of modernization, as it was
explained by the theory of economic growth and the functionalist sociology. From the
early 1960s, the connection between industrialization, urbanization and modernization
was formulated, following an almost causal derivation, by Leonard Reissman and
Kingsley Davis, from the standpoints of social change and demographic transition, relying
on the examples of the North Atlantic countries that had industrialized in the 19th century
(Reissman, 1970; Davis, 1982).9 From that literature could be drawn that Latin Americas
developing nations seemed to be in the path towards urbanization and industrialization, but
they actually suffered from profound distortions by comparison with successful
experiences of modernization in Europe, North America and other parts of the world.
On the one hand, a fledgling industrialization had not preceded but rather followed
urbanization in Latin America, so the ISI was not the equivalent of an industrial
revolution with its dynamic effects on the economic system and demographic transition
and flows (Williamson, 1992: 333). As it happened in other parts of what was about to be
known as the Third World, instead of having pulled to cities waves of population which
could be actually absorbed by manufacturing and other productive sectors, most of Latin
Americas ruralurban migration was pushed by a countryside that had been abandoned
after the urban-focused policies carried on by corporate states (Potter and Lloyd-Evans,
1998: 1213). The adoption of ISI had aggravated the rural crisis in many countries that
had not undergone land reforms: not only the labour force engaged in agriculture declined
in the 19451962 period, but also its productivity in terms of per capita Gross National
Product (GNP) was, in the best of the cases, less than one fourth of the USAs for the same
period (Harris, 1971: 74; Williamson, 1992: 337338).
On the other hand, levels of urbanization almost doubled industrial participation in the
economies of Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil, according to 1950s censuses
(Harris, 1971: 85). Such levels were not possible to be absorbed by the productive system, so
in the long term would produce urban inflation or hyper-urbanisation, as it would happen in
other parts of the Third World (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 1415). In the decades to come,
this surplus of unproductive population living in cities could only be accommodated in slums,
shanty-towns and the informal economy. But it was already clear by the early 1960s that
neither development nor modernization, understood as the outcome stated by ECLAs
developmentalism and functionalist sociology, would result from Latin Americas imbalance
between industrialization and urbanization.
3.2. From urbanismo to planificacion
While developmentalism remained elusive in economic and social terms, some of Latin
Americas metropolises strived to exhibit a modernist image that, in view of the imbalance
9
Daviss well-known interpretation was included in the popular volume The City (1965), which was translated
into Spanish in 1967. Reissmans The Urban Process. Cities in Industrial Societies (1964) took a bit longer, but
reached a great distribution from the Escuela Tecnica de Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB), which also
translated many other titles from English (Reissman, 1972).
97
between industrialization and urbanization, also resulted incomplete and distorted. But it must
be recognized that architectural modernism was a showcase for displaying the rapid modernization pursued by economic developmentalism, whose nationalist ingredients coloured
vernacular and genuine modernismos in some of Latin Americas developing countries. The
peculiarity of alternative modernism reached its peak where the alliance between modernizing governments and modernist architects took place, as in the cases of Mexico, Brazil and
Venezuela, whose university cities, housing projects and administrative buildings were
ranked among the worlds best exponents of the modern movement (Fraser, 2000: 1518).
Foreign and especially US interest for reporting and explaining Latin Americas modernism
was early manifested. Regional maestros such as Mexicos Juan OGorman, Brazils Lucio
Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, followed by Venezuelas Carlos Raul Villanueva, were
catalogued in the exhibitions Brazil Builds (Goodwin, 1943) and Modern Architecture in
Latin America since 1945, organized by New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Modern
Art, the latter with the famous critic Henry-Russel Hitchcock as curator (Hitchcock, 1955).
In the domain of urbanism, major foreign influences in post-war Latin America also shifted
from academicism to functionalist modernism, which was put, like developmentalism and
industrialization, at the service of the progressive goals of democracies and dictatorships
alike. Before the eclipse of academic urbanism, Hannes Meyers left-wing rationalism was
introduced in Mexico during the 19391949 stay of the former Bauhaus director, who had
been invited by President Cardenas. The modern legacy in other Latin American capitals was
enriched during the 1940s, especially through the visits of CIAM luminaries as advisors of the
new planning institutions, some of which came to have national competence. In Le
Corbusiers second proposal for Buenos Aires, prepared with Argentine architects Kurchan
and Ferrari and published in 1947, the analysis of the cardiac system of the inner city,
including the integration of traditional avenues and new motorways, was complemented in
the suburbs with the proposals of radiant cities, satellite towns and a green belt. The
application of the principles of zoning differentiated the urban areas according to their
functional coherence, putting aside the predominance traditionally given to the monumental
articulation of spaces and axes like the Plaza and Avenida de Mayo. While Le Corbusiers
other trips to Bogota were to crystallize in a 1950 plan, CIAMs theoretical presence would be
consolidated with the Spanish edition of the 1941 Charte dAthe`nes, published in Argentina in
1954, completed with its Cuban adaptation in Martnez Inclans Codigo de Urbanismo. After
visits to Havana of modernist maestros such as Richard Neutra (1945), Walter Gropius (1945)
and Joseph Albers (1952), CIAMs leadership among new generations of Cuban architects
was took on by Jose Luis Sert, advisor to the new Junta Nacional de Planificacion (JNP,
National Board of Planning) created in 1955 by Batistas dictatorship.
Having arrived from the late 1940s in Venezuela, but especially during Perez Jimenezs
dictatorship (19521958), planning was advocated by Sert himself, Robert Moses, Francis
Violich and Rotival again, all of them advisors of the Comision Nacional de Urbanismo
(CNU, National Commission of Planning). The French visitor left testimonies of the rise of the
new planning technique in the post-war years. Hired for second time by the Venezuelan
government,10 Rotival (1964) did not wish to be considered any longer as urbaniste, but as
10
Let us remember that Rotivals previous stay had been during the late 1930s, for the first plan of Caracas.
98
representative of the more-comprehensive professional that the planificateur was supposed to

be, according to a differentiation that he would theorize about some years later (Almandoz,
1997: 314315). In the case of Violich, his Cities of Latin America had offered, as we already
know, one of the first comparative perspectives of the Europeanized and academic
backgrounds in several professional milieus he was in contact with throughout his journey.
But it must be pointed out that in that early book the Californian planner had noticed that
younger practising architects and planners started to look towards the United States rather
than to Europe (Violich, 1944: 158, 169, 173). Violich later summarized, in relation to the
Venezuelan experience, the disciplinary shift that had taken place in those decades, what can
be generalized to most of the continent: A latter-day Beaux Arts movement inspired the late
1930s, and a social orientation, the mid-1940s, only to give way in the early 1950s to a
functional approach drawing on North American techniques (Violich, 1975: 285).
In the case of Brazil, after the Russian Gregori Warchavchiks introduction of
international modernism to Sao Paulo since 1923, the presence of CIAM representatives
and Le Corbusiers proposals for Rio fuelled the functionalist momentum that would reach
its peak in Costas and Niemeyers Brasilia. At the same time, in the midst of the boosting
of local governments by the new 1946 constitution, the recently-created Brazilian
Association of Municipalities celebrated its first congress in 1950 (Pereira, 2003: 81). The
transition from urbanismo to planejamento was sped up by father Joseph Lebrets visits to
Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities, where he advocated the principles and variables of
regional and economic planning as a new technique to deal with the sprawl of metropolitan
areas (Lamparelli, 1995; Leme, 1999: 26). The awareness of new approaches to regional
planning in the professional milieu was evinced in the criticisms against the Brasilia plan,
for not having incorporated more economists, ecologists, and social scientists, as it was
spelt out by the historian Gilberto Freyre, a leading voice of Brazils social sciences.
Costas reply was not only clever but also representative of a turning point of the
discipline: the new capital city was not supposed to be the outcome but the cause of a
regional plan (Fraser, 2000: 230).
It is not a coincidence that the use of the term urbanismo during the first decades of the
20th century in Latin America was replaced after the second world war by planificacion or
planeamiento in Spanish, and by planejamento in Portuguese. Since, they often appear
intermingled as mere synonyms, the seeming duplicity can be attributed to a vocabulary
that, in this case, is richer in Spanish and Portuguese than in English. In the latter,
urbanism did not use to have a disciplinary connotation alternative to British town
planning or American urban planninga situation that would only change in the postmodern era. But there actually are conceptual and historical nuances associated to each
term: as it has been outlined for industrialized countries, unlike French urbanisme, Italian
urbanistica and German Stadtebau, Anglo-Saxon town planning stressed systemic,
procedural and/or political values, relying for that purpose on social sciences and its
technical apparatus instead of design, just to thus sum up the most widespread orientation
that planning had by the mid-20th century (Piccinato, 1987; Taylor, 1998; Hebbert, 2004).
While involving some meanings of that construct, Latin Americas transition from
urbanismo into planificacion coincided with the takeover of the poles from which
technical modernity was imported. As it had happened in the domains of medicine and
engineering, among others, the academic urbanism that had mainly arrived from Europe
99
until the late 1930s, was to give way to a package of master plans, zoning ordinances and
planning-related instruments and institutions copied from the USA (Almandoz, 2002:
3139).11 Mainly transferred to Latin America by the European maestros exiled in
Harvard and MIT, Yale and Berkeley, CIAMs functionalism became the mainstream
where diverse methodological influences of planning were incorporated to. Ranging from
economic and social variables to regional and systemic approaches, all of them were added
in heterodox combinations to Latin Americas national platforms of functionalist
planificacion and planejamento. If there had been some Taylorist functionalism as
underlying rationality at the crystallization of urbanismo from the 1930s in countries like
Argentina and Brazil (Outtes, 1997: 18), it was during the post-war developmentalism
when a more procedural and technocratic functionalism fuelled the transition to planning
and the definitive adoption of zoning, which spread throughout most the continent by the
1960s. The more technocratic climate that accompanied planning would also shape a more
specialized relationship with urban studies and history as an specific component, as we
shall see in Chapter 4.
The distinctions involved in Latin Americas transition from urbanismo into planificacion
were recognized, from a more theoretical than historical perspective, by Emilio Harth-Terre
and Patricio Randle, who participated in that metamorphosis of the emerging discipline and
could therefore look at it with hindsight. In his Filosofa en el urbanismo (1961, Fig. 8), HarthTerre declared himself to be in favour of this term that corresponded to the science of the
city, whereas the overrating of the word planificacion, as a consequence of the growing
admiration for the Anglo-Saxon world in Latin American universities, would have led to the
degenerating sequel of planeamiento urbano as neologism, which unnecessarily replaced
very pure and expressive word urbanismo.
Notwithstanding his foreign name, Harth-Terre claimed the Castilian origin of the word
back to Ildefonso Cerdas La teora de la urbanizacion y aplicacion de los principios y
doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona (1867)which would have preceded the
alleged coining of the term for Romance languages in Poetes work. Having been adopted
more via North Americas city planning than through Britains town planning,
planeamiento urbano ended up being, according to the Peruvian architect, an unnecessary
periphrasis that would only be acceptable if the preeminence of urbanismo was
recognized as the science of the city, whereas planning was regarded as its technique. In
fact, Harth-Terres work can be understood in itself as a theoretical contribution to the
scientific status of the disciplinea task for which the author regarded the architect as
primus inter pares (Harth-Terre, 1961: 64, 124126).
Some years later, on the assumption that in Spanish both terms were acceptable, in his
book Que es el urbanismo (1968, Fig. 9), Randle did not regard them, though, as
synonyms, attributing rather a historical and conceptual meaning to each word. Because of
being the heirs of so many influences, Latin Americans would have adopted urbanismo
since the trends that had led the rise of this activity were French; planeamiento urbano,
instead, would have prevailed after the second world war throughout the English
influence, by which the Argentine professor probably meant the Anglo-Saxon influx that
11
Once again I rely on this review, where more specific bibliography can be found.
100
arrived to Latin America via the US. But Randle went beyond the mere succession of
words and decided to tackle the Byzantine distinction that intrigued him, daring to put
forward the following differentiation between urbanismo and planeamiento urbano:
.they are two diverse and consecutive concepts whose starting point would be the
urbanismo in its acceptation closest to the building aesthetic, to the urban public
work and to the provision of public services, according to the first treatises of the late
19th century and the beginning of the twentieth. After that, instead, while the theory
and practice were perfected, planeamiento urbano would arise as a new task, in
which the aesthetical side would be a consequence of more comprehensive and
scientific concerns, such as land use and circulation. (Randle, 1968: 22).12
The books of Randle and Harth-Terre managed to set in theoretical perspective what
seemed to be a fashion that replaced urbanismo by planificacion in Latin America, but
actually mirrored more structural changes of the discipline. As Harth-Terre emphasized, if
the terminological mutation had certainly to do with the order of appearance and diffusion
of the words in Spanish and Portuguese, it corresponded at the same time to a displacement
of the poles from which technical modernity was imported in post-war Latin America,
from Europe to the United States. On a more practical level, that shift represented, as
Randle pointed out, a replacement of the building aesthetic of early-20th-century projects
by a more comprehensive and functional conception of the planes produced by local and
national offices of planning. From the Mexico that gave refuge to Meyer to the Argentina
that boasted the first edition of the Carta de Atenasalmost two decades earlier than The
Athens Charter (1973) appeared in Englishseveral of those offices advocated concepts
and instruments transferred by CIAM-related advisers, as Sert did in Caracas and Havana.
So, as it had happened with Beaux-Arts academicism during the emergence of the
discipline in the 1930s, functionalist modernism framed the platform on which the
transition from urbanismo to planificacion was built up in post-war Latin America.
3.3. The historical agenda of the Latin American city
Since the 1940s, the teaching of history in some of Latin Americas universities could
be differentiated only when architectural schools managed to overcome the 19th-century
dichotomy, rooted in the Bourbon reforms of the late Colonial period, between the artistic
precepts of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the engineering of the Ecole Polytechniques
(Torre, 2002: 549551). As to the incipient teaching of urbanism, the transition towards
planificacion seemed to be initially accompanied by the institutionalization of history as
an instrumental component aimed at enriching the professional practice, especially in
Argentinas mature milieu. In this respect we must remember the visit of Poete, invited by
12
My translation of: .se tratara de dos conceptos diversos y sucesivos teniendo como punto de partida el
urbanismo en su aceptacion mas proxima a la estetica edilicia, a la obra publica urbana y a la provision de
servicios urbanos, conforme a los primeros tratados de fines del siglo anterior y comienzos de este. Luego, en
cambio, a la vez que se perfecciona la teora y la practica, surgira como una nueva tarea la del planeamiento
urbano, en la que el lado estetico era solo una consecuencia de otras preocupaciones mas integrales y cientficas
tales como el uso del suelo y la circulacion.
101
his disciple della Paolera, for launching the UBAs Curso Superior de Urbanismo
(Advanced Course of Planning), which was still influenced by the evolutionist orientation
of the Parisian Institut dUrbanisme. This link between history and practice was
accompanied, in Argentinas public administration, by a more sector-structured approach
to the evolution of city, supposed to provide inputs for regional plans, according to the
guidelines introduced in those years by the Division of Urban Information belonging to the
General Direction of Public Works and Urban Planning (DGOPU) (Novick, 2003: 12).
A pioneer of Latin Americas urban historical agenda that was about to crystallize,
Jorge E. Hardoy witnessed the unfocused approach of that exhausted evolutionism, still
associated with an old-fashioned urbanism that was no longer able to meet the
requirements of the emerging planning. According to his later testimony, the contents of
the 1940s syllabuses did not facilitate either the understanding of the citys evolution or
the historic centres that underwent rapid expansion and overcrowding; it somehow
happened as with the urbanismo that was practised by then: even though there were
interventions inspired on modern functionalism, the renewal plans often remained stuck to
partial approaches to traffic, green areas or embellishment, without incorporating
economic, social and environmental dimensions that already accompanied technical
planning in Europe and North America (Hardoy, 1991: 143).
The evolutionist emphasis was replaced in the following decade with the consolidation
of the planning culture and the differentiation of history as one of its components. By the
mid-1950s, the reform in the teaching of town planning, among other disciplines, became
an important reference at Argentinas National University of Rosario (UNR), where della
Paolera had promoted the course on urbanism since 1929 (Randle, 1977: 12). The UNR
then invited outstanding professionals from Buenos Aires that were also interested in
architectural and urban historiography, such as Bullrich and Hardoy, whose courses were
attended by a younger generation of students, including Ramon Gutierrez and Roberto
Segre (Almandoz, 2003: 201202). In spite of this relative advance, there seemed to be
still a shallow historical approach in the teaching of planning, what Gutierrez attributes to
the predominance of CIAMs de-contextualized prospective.
By those years the teaching of town planning was dominated by the application of the
CIAM model. There was little room for discussing a historical view of the problem, and in
general urban plans incorporated aspects of historical evolution just as a cultural veneer
that did not influence the design of proposals or the generation of urban measures. It was
difficult to understand the possibility of formulating a future from history itself; it was
always more important the foreign model of what had to be than understanding what it
was.(Almandoz, 2004: 244).13
If the aimless and almost decorative incorporation of urban history in the teaching and
practice of planning can be generalized to other countries up to the 1950s (Gutierrez, 1997;
13
My translation of: La ensenanza del urbanismo en estos anos estaba dominada por la aplicacion del modelo del
CIAM. Haba poco espacio para discutir una vision historica del problema, y en general los planes urbanos
incorporaban aspectos de la evolucion historica como un simple barniz cultural que no tena incidencia en
propuestas de diseno o en la gestacion de medidas urbanas. Era difcil entender la posibilidad de formular un
futuro desde la propia historia; siempre pesaba mas el modelo externo de lo que se deba ser antes de entender
lo que se era.
102
Torre, 2002), Latin Americas urban studies began to systematically analyze, in the
following decade, the historical, economic and sociological relationship among
industrialization, urbanization and modernization. These elements were applied to
determine a sort of epochal equation aimed at transforming Webers Western modernity
into a regional modernization in the sense pointed out by Habermas (Gorelik, 2004: 33).
This vision of the city as a catalyst of social change was present in Philip M. Hausers
interpretation as editor of La urbanizacion en America Latina (Hauser, 1967, Fig. 10), a
book resulting from an international conference held in Santiago de Chile in July 1959,
under the patronage of UNESCO and the ECLA. Without including much historical
review, that books rather sociological interpretation would be influential not only for later
publications that adopted its functionalist approachsuch as the already-quoted Harriss
The Growth of Latin American Cities (1971, Fig. 11)but also in terms of the critical
reaction that prompted, which would be led by Jorge E. Hardoy.
Coming from the architectural field, the Argentine Jorge Hardoy (Fig. 12) stood out
from the 1960s as the continental groundbreaker of a more focused urban history of Latin
America, especially after his work Las ciudades precolombinas (1964) (Hardoy, 1973,
Fig. 13). Jointly with the Americans Richard Schaedel and Richard Morse,14 among
others, Hardoy organized symposia about regional urbanization in the context of the
International Congresses of Americanists (ICA): Mar del Plata (1966), Stuttgart (1968),
Lima (1970, Fig. 14), Rome (1972, Fig. 15), Mexico city (1974) and Paris (1976, Fig. 16).
The early ones dealt with Latin Americas urbanization in general and throughout different
historical periods, searching to facilitate a wide exchange of ideas among archaeologists,
architects, anthropologists, social and art historians, as well as town planners (Schaedel
and Hardoy, 1975: 16). But after Limas ICA, a central issue was set for each meeting,
which reviewed the subject from the preColumbian to the contemporary times.
Also in terms of events, it is noteworthy that an International Seminar about the
Situation of the Historiography of Latin American Architecture was held in Caracas in
October 1967, at the Central University of Venezuelas Centre of Historical and
Aesthetical Research (CIHE) (Fig. 17). Even though the events conclusions did not make
explicit the necessity of an urban agenda as such, the aim to go beyond the architectural
arena was perceivable in the wish for giving to historiography an active character that
could incorporate it operatively in the context of contemporary Latin American culture,
as it was expressed by Gasparini (1968: 1112), organizer of the event. Another figure of
international stature, Gaspirini was the director of the CIHE since its creation in 1963, a
centre that, especially through its bulletin (Fig. 18), carried out a fundamental task
comparable to Hardoys Centro de Estudios Urbanos (CEUR, Centre of Urban Studies) at
the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires.
Besides the CIHE and CEUR, there were other nuclei reckoned by Gutierrez as
fundamental for the field that was being contoured: the Grupo de Estudios Urbanos (GEU,
Group of Urban Studies), founded by Mariano Arana in Uruguay; the Oikos group,
14
Trained as an architect in Argentina, Hardoy received a PhD in city and regional planning from Harvard
University, what made him familiar with the North American academia and professional milieu. By the time of
these events and collective publications, Richard Morse was Professor at the Department of History, Yale
University; Richard Schaedel was Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin.
103
promoted by Patricio Randle in Argentina; the Catholic University of Chiles Instituto de

Urbanismo (Institute of Urbanism), which edited the Eure journal and gathered Armando
de Ramon, Patricio Gros and Gabriel Guarda; the works of Paulo Santos and Nestor
Goulart Reis, junior, in Brazil, as well as those by Carlos Williams and Santiago Agurto in
Peru (Almandoz, 2004: 245).
In addition to the growing importance given by architectural journals to urban history,
the all-embracing perspective of colonial and republican periods was consolidated by the
1960s and 1970s in several compilations about Latin Americas urbanization. They were
edited in Spanish by Hardoy and Tobar (1969); Solano (1975, Fig. 19), as well as in
English by Hardoy (1975, Fig. 20), and Roberts (1978, Fig. 21). Among the multi-authored
books that contributed to inform the continents historiography, one of the most successful
resulted from the joint effort of experts on Latin American architecture, such as Bullrich,
Hardoy and Segre, among others that in 1967 had gathered in Lima under UNESCOs
patronage, and in Buenos Aires two years later. With chapters addressing diverse urban
aspects such as the process of urbanization, the shaping of metropolitan areas and squatter
settlements, the transformation of the rural context and the emergence of new towns, the
book finally appeared under the not-very-representative title of America Latina en su
arquitectura (1975), edited by Segre (1983), with successive editions until the early 1980s
(Fig. 22).
The historical review of the Latin American city, a category that was built up and
delimitated in the 1960s, can thus be regarded as part of the political, economic and
cultural agenda set up for the region by ECLA and UNESCO (Gorelik, 2004: 3334). In
consonance with a discipline that was shifting from urbanismo into planificacion, that
agenda was underpinned, on institutional grounds, with the constitution of the Sociedad
Interamericana de Planificacion (SIAP, Inter-American Society of Planning) and the
Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO, Latin American Council of
Social Sciences), which included a Commission for Urban and Regional Development.
Also sponsored by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, SIAP and CLACSO published
some of the above-referred compilations, which not only were a required reading for a
new generation of scholars (Gutierrez, 1995: 7), but also finally materialized, as a
bibliographic corpus, the historical agenda of the Latin American city. If some of these
institutional changes were fuelled by the impulse of developmentalism and the general
quest for modernization, we must not forget, though, the role of Hardoy, Morse and
Gasparini, among other pioneers whose initiative and sense of opportunity led to focusing
on the historical field, using for that purpose the ICA and other international and
interdisciplinary conferences. In this respect prevailed the examples of the US, Britain and
Italy, where major events and international exchange had sealed the new field from the
early 1960s (Handlin and Burchard, 1967; Dyos, 1968; Zucconi, 2002)not much earlier
than in Latin America after all.
104
4
The dominance of dependence
4.1. The failure of modernization and the emergence of the SoD
Cubas 1959 revolution, which ousted Batista from power and installed the Marxist
regime led by Fidel Castro, prefigured Latin Americas political and economic climate in
the rest of the Cold War. In order to forestall further leftist revolutions, the Kennedy
administration decided to promote the so-called Alliance for Progress (AfP), a programme
aimed at consolidating the ISI, promoting land reform and reducing social inequalities
through US help to new democratic governments of the region. Beneficiaries included
Romulo Betancourt (19591964) in Venezuela; Arturo Frondizi (19581962) in
Argentina; Fernando Belaunde Terry (19631968) in Peru; Eduardo Frei (19641970)
in Chile; and, especially, Alberto Lleras Camargo (19581962) and Carlos Lleras
Restrepo (19661970) in Colombia (Williamson, 1992: 349).
In spite of the AfP aid and ISIs long presence in biggest economies, by the late 1960s
industrialization had neither diversified nor consolidated in Latin America, especially in
terms of durable consumer goods and machinery. The weakness of economic integration
within the region, the small size of some of the national markets and the disadvantage of
most of the countries for competing with their manufacture in international circuits
already flooded with produce made in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the rest of the far eastare
some of the factors argued to explain the ISIs structural and contextual constrains. But
before its eventual failure, the deepening of the ISI from light to intermediate
manufacture and heavy machinery, which had been tried throughout the 1960s, aggravated
the economic and social distortions of underdevelopment.
For deepening involved a qualitative change in production from the easy phase of ISI,
involving labour-intensive, low-skilled, low-technology manufacturing to the hard phase of
capital intensive, high-skilled, high-technology industries. The result was that the rising tide
of fugitives from the crisis in the countryside could not be absorbed by industry in the cities, so
that during the 1960s urban unemployment began to soar (Williamson, 1992: 339340).
Indeed, by the early 1970s it was already evident that, beyond the industrial bourgeoisie
and middle classes, the modernizing style of development of the previous decades had
not spread its effects to other strata of population, especially to the growing mass of urban
poverty which was fuelled by ruralurban migration (Clichevsky, 1990: 25). The failure
of economic growth, developmentalism and modernization were worsened, after 1973, by
the inflationary effects of the international oil crisis, which in Latin America were not only
caused by the soaring prices of fuels as such, but also by the unaffordable increase of the
machinery imported from the industrialized world. Fuelled by the penetration of socialism
and guerrillas, the economic and social malaise led some of Latin Americas most stable
democracies to embrace dictatorships or military juntas that would mark their evolution up
to the 1980s, as it was dramatically epitomized in Augusto Pinochets Chile (19731990).
The exhaustion of ISI thus fractured the fragile support that industrialization had provided
in the post-war decades to the urbanization process, whose level increased from 57.4% in 1970
105
to 65.4 in 1980 in Latin America altogether (Clichevsky, 1990: 42). Far above Africa and
Asiawhich were still 28.7 and 26.6 by 1980, respectivelyLatin America was the most
urbanized region of what, rather than developing, started to be known as the Third World
(Drakakis-Smith, 1990; Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 2425).15 Throughout most of the
1970s, Latin Americas gross rates of urban growth were six times higher than the rural ones
(Clichevsky, 1990: 48), what indicated the massive flows arriving to cities from the
countryside. On top of that, most this population was highly concentrated in national
territories: not only Latin America boasted three of the Third Worlds five megalopolis above
8 million by 1970 (Clark, 2000: 46), but more than a half of the national populations of
Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile and Colombia lived in metropolitan areas above
100 000 inhabitants by 1980 (Clichevsky, 1990: 54).
From the 1970s Latin America thus exhibited the most dramatic effects of hyperurbanization, such as the hypertrophy of the tertiary sector and informal economy that
camouflaged surplus of urban labour force, completed with the proliferation of squatter
settlements and poverty. The failure of developmentalism and modernization and the
ensuing syndrome of Third World urbanization challenged ECLAs functionalist approach
in social sciences that had prevailed in Latin America up to the 1960s.
Partly conceived as an alternative to the liberal doctrine of comparative advantage, which
had traditionally explained Latin Americas historical sluggishness within the world economy
since the late colonial period,16 the theory of Dependence reinterpreted the centre/periphery
antinomy as a structural hindrance that could only be overcome on the basis of the states
public intervention, similar to USAs Keynesianism (Williamson, 1998: 334335). In this
respect the Dependence approach was not originally opposed to ECLAs initiatives, including
the ISI; but insofar as the latter proved to be exhausted, the dependentismo became a
predominantly Marxist response to capitalist developmentalism.17 With later contributions by
Brazils Celso Furtado, Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, among others, the theory
turned into a Marxist school of social sciences, providing a historical matrix aimed at
understanding Latin Americas backwardness during the colonial and republican eras,
including the economic, political and social dimensions of underdevelopment (Palma, 1978).
Marking Latin Americas intellectual climate in the Cold War era, the School of Dependence
(SoD) would remain highly influential in different domains and countries until the early 1980s.
4.2. Loosing spatiality
The structural problems of the so-called dependent urbanization throughout the 20th
century were described and analyzed by Castells in Imperialismo y urbanizacion en
15
The Third World syndrome has been summed up in the following terms (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 12): As
health and social welfare standards are generally so much better in the cities than in the rural areas, Third World cities
exemplify par excellence the combination of preindustrial fertility with post-industrial mortality. Contemporary cities
in the developing world exhibit some of the highest rates of natural increase ever found in cities.
16
An excellent example of the application of the doctrine of comparative advantage for the both North and Latin
America in the 19 century was made by Morse (1975).
17
I acknowledge again the valuable distinction established by one of the readers of the first version of this article
submitted to Planning in Process.
106
America Latina (1973, Fig. 23), and by Schteingart in Urbanizacion y dependencia en

America Latina (1973). The social and political aspects of the regions cities as dramatic
stages of that urbanization were meanwhile typified by Kaplan (1972); Quijano (1977),
among others. A historical analysis of the continental and national networks of cities was
carried out by Rofman (1977) in Dependencia, estructura de poder y formacion regional
en America Latina (Fig. 24)one of the few attempts to render more geographical the
SoDs rather structural discourse.
Without seeking a properly historical perspective, another territorial and even spatial
approach was tried by Segre in Las estructuras ambientales de America Latina (1977,
Fig. 25). Beyond his abundant architectural production, in the domain of urban studies,
Segres Marxist background was influenced by Lefebvres Le droit a` la ville (1974) and
Fernando de Ramons La ideologa urbanstica (1970), as well as by Gino Germanis
structural courses which he had attended in Buenos Aires, besides his own teaching at
Havanas Jose Antonio Echeverra Polytechnic Institute (ISPJAE).18 Following a Marxist
rationale for different case studies, Segre reviewed some of the continents territorial and
spatial problems in different scales: from the weakness of urban networks inherited from
the Colony to the contemporary threats to historic centres in the middle of modernizing
cities, all of which issues were set against the background of capitalist interests in Latin
America (Segre, 1977). In spite of its historical limitations and voids, that book entered the
spatial and territorial arena, unlike other SoD representativesMartha Schteingart, Emilio
Pradilla Cobos, Fernando Carrion, Raquel Rolnik, Paul Singer and Oswaldo Sunkelthat
influenced his work, according to Segres own recognition (Almandoz, 2003b: 204).
Besides the lack of spatial and territorial projection, the oblivion of cultural aspects was
another weakness of the SoDthough it would be more than compensated by Jose Luis
Romeros classic Latinoamerica: las ciudades y las ideas (1976, Fig. 26). Even though the
Argentine scholar assumed the heteronomous and ideological development of the Creole
capital cities as platforms of an imported modernity, his pioneering history of ideas
managed to escape from Marxist principles and the economy-bound agenda of the school
(Romero, 1984: 1920).
In addition to the fact that not all the symptoms of Latin Americas dependent
urbanization equally caught the SoDs interest, its approach was somehow ahistorical, as
it has often happened with social scientists dealing with the Third World urbanization
(Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 1998: 28). From the perspective of historiography, the SoD
authors offered in many cases interpretations more than studies grounded on a careful
exploration of the sources (Guerra, 1989: 605). In this respect, the history from below
advocated by the Dependence studies favoured the demographic and economic
urbanization over the city and its urban fabric (Novick, 2003: 14). This is why one
could say that Sojas (1995) thesisaccording to which the Marxist critique reinstated
space in social theory in the case of post-structuralist geographyis not applicable to the
SoDs economic-oriented analyses, which rather contributed to the loss of spatiality of
Latin Americas urban planning historiography.
18
Having studied architecture at the UBA, Segre settled in Cuba since 1963, where he taught at the ISPJAE and
the Faculty of Arts of Havanas University.
107
By contrast to the SoDs structuralism, Randles interesting interpretation of urban

historiography in Evolucion urbanstica (1972, Fig. 27) remindedas a rare example of the
above-referred morphology and evolutionism that had underpinned the field in Latin
Americathe influence of French historians and urbanists such as Lavedan, Poete and
Bardet, combined with the organicism of Geddes and Mumford. Different from the biological
and social evolutionism of Darwin and Spencer, Randles urban planning evolution claimed to
be a category more specific than the urban historical geography or than the town or planning
history: it ought to prevent the lack of spatiality that often leads to clashing with other
historical approaches, while allowing an elaboration or processing of historical data with its
own method and aim (Randle, 1972: 1314). These methods ranged from Spenglers
historical and cultural morphology to the elaboration of time sections after the model of
Geddess surveys. All of those ingredients were gathered by the leader of the Oikos group in
the intuitive and organic notion of evolucion urbanstica, whose differentiation regarding
other theoretical orientations was established in the following terms:
Evolution, elan vital, chance, here they are three keywords semantically intertwined
in a complex way. It is the answer to positivism, to 19th-century materialism, to
Darwinian mechanism. And this is the epoch when, without the name of town
planning evolution or without any name, the discipline that was to be proposed and
developed by a handful of scholars with different backgrounds was conceived. The
concern of those scholars for finding clues, remains of regularity, basic norms of
the city life do not take them to fall into a simplistic and anticultural pragmatism; on
the contrary, that concern leads them to choosing the term evolution, which they use
one time and another to imply the vital contents so well presented by Bergsons
philosophy (Randle, 1972: 1920).19
Often used in urban studies that served as introductions to plans in Argentina since the
early 20th century, this evolutionist view had certainly lasted in university courses that
Randles book is representative of.20 However, as it has been pointed out by Novick in
order to contextualize it, such evolutionism looked still anchored in the ideas of the
genetic urbanism from which discusses with Marxist urban sociology that dominated
Argentinas intellectual field of the 1970s. This is why the fact that Randles emphasis on
physical and professional dimensions ended up approaching the principles of the operative
history and anticipating those of the urban architecture of the 1980s, has been played down
19
My translation of: Evolucion, elan vital, azar, he aqu tres palabras claves enlazadas semanticamente de una
manera compleja. Es la respuesta al positivismo, al materialismo decimononico, al mecanicismo darwinista. Y es la
epoca en que se gesta esta disciplina que sin el nombre de evolucion urbanstica, o sin nombre alguno, va a ser
propuesta y desarrollada por un punado de estudiosos de la mas variada procedencia. Para estos estudiosos, la
preocupacion por encontrar pistas, vestigios de regularidad, normas basicas en la vida de las ciudades no los lleva a
caer en un pragmatismo simplista y anticultural, sino que, por el contrario, les hace escoger el termino evolucion que
emplean una y otra vez implicando esos contenidos vitales tan bien expuestos en toda la filosofa bergsoniana.
20
Evolutionist reviews of the origins of urbanism were included in the already-mentioned treatises of the
discipline published in the 1960s by Harth-Terre and Randle. If the formers Filosofa en el urbanismo focused on
drawing the epistemology of urbanism from preceding disciplines, what led him to a more philosophical than
historical report, the latters Que es el urbanismo went beyond the review, in order to establish his own historical
search and typology, both in urban and planning terms.
108
as involuntary and paradoxical (Novick, 2003: 1415). Albeit it may be contested that
Randles clairvoyance was an ensuing consequence of his meaningful role as a rare
survivor of early-20th-century evolutionism and morphology (Fig. 28).
It remains true anyway that, beyond Argentina, where one of its most productive nuclei
could be found, the SoDs Marxist structuralism pervaded Latin Americas social sciences
in general and urban studies in particular. In addition to the SoD authors referred above,
the dominance of the Dependence approach is traceable not only in many of the SIAP and
CLACSO publications, but also in some others by pioneers of urban historiography
(Hardoy, 1975; Morse, 1975a; Roberts, 1978). As it had occurred with developmentalism
and modernization on economic and social arena, the SoD defeated the evolutionism and
morphology of the studies coming from history of art and geography. There was thus
established a clear dominance in an urban historiography highly economic and
sociological, which in great deal obliterated its spatial references, as it happened with
the practice of planificacion itself.
109
5
Morphological revival
5.1. The lost decade and neo-liberalism
The failure of ISI, the 1970s oil crisis and the ensuing hyperinflation aggravated an
endemic problem that has menaced Latin American republics ever since political
independence: the foreign debt. Economic unrest of the last decades made most of the
republics increase their loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Bank (WB) and other multilateral agencies, so that Latin Americas foreign debt rose from
US$ 352 183 millions in 1983 to 401 360 in 1988. Meanwhile, rates of economic growth
not only were contracted but also became negative during the same period (Clichevsky,
1990: 29), even for the case of Venezuela and other oil-exporting countries, which had
endured minor degrees of inflation and indebtedness. Only Jamaica, Colombia and Chile
avoided a general decline in per capita income (United Nations, 1996: 45). This is why the
1980s was dubbed by ECLA as Latin Americas lost decade, especially by contrast with
the astounding development achieved by the Asian tigersSouth Korea, Singapore
Malaysia, Thailandas well as Spain and other new members of the former European
Community (EC).
Latin Americas increasing dependence on financial agencies entitled the IMF and
WB to progressively dictate economic and social recipes to be adopted. Marked by
the New Right of the Anglo-American axis, the plans of adjustments prescribed
from 1982 were in fact packages of neo-liberal policies, including reductions of the
huge bureaucracies and privatization of many services and companies of Latin
Americas corporate states. With the direct advice of Milton Friedman and the school
of Chicago boys, Pinochets Chile was an early success that demonstrated how
reforms could be undertaken under authoritarian regimesas it had somehow been
the case of South Korea and Francos Spain in the last years. The neo-liberal package
was applicable yet unstable in the long term, in the cases of C. Salinas de Gortari
(19881994) in Mexico and Carlos Menem in Argentina (19891995, 19951999),
especially during his first term. But reforms required by the IMF and WB proved to
be disastrous when they were applied too late and drastically after a period of relative
bonanza, as it happened during the second government of Carlos A. Perez in
Venezuela (19891993), marked by riots, social unrest and military coups.
Venezuelas climate of political and social violence was exported to other Latin
American countries where, worsened by financial cracks in the mid-1990s, neo-liberal
adjustments did not manage to diminish social inequities but rather increased poverty
and criminality by the end of the decade (Rotker, 2000).
With 71.4% of its population living in urban settlements by 1990, Latin America
completed the cycle of urbanization in the midst of neo-liberalism that tried to palliate the
recession of the lost decade. Slower population growth was prompted by lower fertility
and less ruralurban immigration, what resulted in smaller increases in the levels of
urbanization and the much smaller rates of growth for many of the regions larger cities
110
(United Nations, 1996: 4243).21 The completion of the cycle of urbanization in most of
the countries must not be mistaken, though, for the correction of the territorial unbalances
or economic distortions. An indicator of Latin Americas excessive urban concentration is
that, with 29% by 1990, there were more people living in million-cities than living in
rural areas (United Nations, 1996: 4748).
The stronger attraction of million-cities over major metropolises was caused by the
latters exhaustion in terms of worn-out infrastructure and deterioration of the living
standards, what in turn led to a shift from ruralurban to inter-urban migration
(Clichevsky, 1990: 47). Medium-size cities of some of the regions most urbanized
countries were favoured by this turn, especially in the case of professionals of the middle
classes looking for affordable housing and other services. Although the relative loss of
concentration can be regarded as a positive effect of the completion of the cycle of
urbanization, that mobility has actually mirrored desperate middle classes impoverished
by the decrease of the per capita income and even the cut of real wages.
Partly as a consequence of the loss of industrial jobs and the cuts in public bureaucracy
recommended by liberal reforms, urban unemployment and informal sector increased in
all countries (United Nations, 1996: 46). The diversification of informal economy and the
aggravation of poverty have had dramatic effects in the urban scene, especially in terms of
the invasion of the public space by street vendors and the establishment of gated
communities in both residential districts and shanty towns. The segregation of the dual
city, has been accompanied by the deterioration of infrastructure and the general increase
of urban poverty, which by 1990 amounted to 40% of the population in Colombia, 38 in
Brazil, 28 in Venezuela and 23 in Mexico, among some of Latin Americas most advanced
countries (United Nations, 1996: 528). Criminality, social unrest and lack of governance
thereafter remained as national problems whose most dramatic stages have been
metropolitan areas under the pressure of conflicting groups (Villasante, 1994; Rotker,
2000). Not a very promising agenda for a continent that has completed its urbanization
after more than a century.
5.2. The resurface of space and territory
Latin Americas malaise after the failure of developmental modernization seemed to be
repeated during the lost decade regarding the fall of the Marxist utopia. The penetration of
neo-liberal recipes was eased by the inefficiency of centralized systems of planning, whose
21
It is convenient to finally differentiate this general panorama according to the countries level of urbanization
by the mid-1990s (United Nations, 1996: 48): Although the accuracy of comparisons between countries in their
level of urbanization are always limited by the differences in the criteria used to define urban centres, it is possible
to identify three groups of nations. The first, the most urbanized with more than 80% of their population living in
urban areas includes the three nations in the Southern Cone and Venezuela. The second with between 50 and 80%
in urban areas includes most of the countries that had rapid and industrial development during the period 1950
1990Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombiaand also Cuba (that was already one of the
most urbanized nations in the region in 1950), Bolivia, Peru and Nicaragua and Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.
The third with less than 50% of the population in urban areas includes only one in South America (Paraguay) and
one in the Caribbean (Haiti) along with a group of countries in Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador,
Guatemala and Honduras)..
111
theorists had often nurtured from the SoDs structural critique of the social and economic
inequities of capitalism, without putting forward feasible alternatives of development.
After a reaction against the too Dependence-oriented analyses that also happened in
other fields of Latin Americas economic and social history (Mauro, 1989: 641), most of
that Marxist rationality would be also rejected as a historical explanation throughout the
1980s, though some of the SoDs urban statements would resurface in later approaches,
reinterpreted from diverse perspectives and contexts. The SoDs historical exhaustion ran
parallel to the re-emergence of space and territory in disciplines dealing with the Latin
American city.
The resurface of historical spatiality had been announced in different ways. On the one
hand, as it happened in other regions of the world, the awareness of the importance of the
cultural heritage encouraged, especially from the 1970s, the teaching of architectural
history in Latin Americas academic milieus. In this respect, Quitos 1977 colloquium was
a landmark for the concern about historic centres, a subject that had already been
introduced in the Netherlands 1956 CIAM. A first generation of traditional centres
recuperated in the region since the 1950s included Brazils Salvador de Bahia, Colombias
Cartagena, Panama City and San Juan de Puerto Rico, Antigua, Ecuadors Quito and
Mexicos Guanajuato, Zacatecas, Taxco and San Miguel Allende. By the late 1970s Latin
America boasted 32 of the 164 centres declared as UNESCOs Cultural Heritage of
Humanity (Gonzalez, 2002b: 158, 175, 199). In the professional practice, that concern
helped to integrate the historical processes to the formulation of urban proposalsa task
in which the stance of a renown planner as Hardoy in favour of historic centres played was
fundamental, as Gutierrez recognized (Almandoz, 2004: 244). In the academia, the
conservacion of the centres must be regarded as a factor that highlighted history as a
framework for the teaching of theory and criticism, a situation that can still be found in
some of Latin Americas architectural schools (Torre, 2002: 549, 551). In this context also
characterized by the last stages of the SoD coming from social sciences, the appearance of
books and treatises that departed from and took on the regions peculiarities was another
factor that announced the maturity of Latin Americas planning history and its progressive
differentiation from architectural historiography.
As an antecedent worth mentioning, from the 1960s Marina Waisman (Fig. 29) had
edited the series of Cuadernos Summa Nueva Vision, which aimed at serving as an
alternative to the predominance of foreign classics in Latin Americas architectural
schools (Torre, 2002: 554, 557). Her best known book, La estructura historica del entorno
(1972), cannot be considered a work of urbanism, not even of architectural history in the
traditional sense. However, in her attempt to establish a new epistemology for the
architecture of the industrial era, relying for that purpose on the discursive-formation
method similar to the one unfolded in Foucaults Larcheologie du savoir (1969), the
Argentine professor updated and enlarged the concept of entorno (environment) as
cultural unity (Waisman, 1972: 47), in such a way that opened and strengthened links
with the city and its planning.
In this respect, Waismans influential interpretationwhich had great impact among a
generation of architectural historians and critics in Argentina and Latin America in
generaladvocated that historical research was supported rather by structural
relationships among the objects than by its focus on the objects as such. Furthermore,
112
within this sort of vectorial complex of the cultural field of architecture, the relations of
the work with the environment were recognized as one of architectures traditional issues
of historical studies (Waisman, 1972: 43, 59; 1990). Even though Waismans book did
not identify an explicit link with the city and planning, both of them can be said to be
encompassed in her notion of entorno, in as much as the study of the historical relationship
with the urban components of that environment is recognized as belonging to the
architectures epistemology.
The appearance of treatises written by Latin American scholars also contributed to
regain spatiality and consolidate the peculiarity of planning historiography. If we look for
general histories of the discipline, it was Roberto Segre (Fig. 30) who undertook the
difficult taskthe sole attempt in Latin America, as far as I knowof reconstructing the
emergence of urbanismo during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the context of
developed countries. This was partly due to the fact that he taught at the faculty of
architecture of the Havana University, where, understandably, a lot of effort was invested
in building up an alternative history of Western architecture, different from the allegedly
capitalist-oriented interpretation of traditional authors.
Segres titanic effort was materialized in Historia de la arquitectura y del urbanismo.
Pases desarrollados. Siglos XIX y XX (1985, Fig. 31). On the basis of the main
interpretative stock of the Modern Movement, where he grouped planning historians such
as Benevolo (1968, 1974), Sica (19761978); Ragon (1991), and especially in the latters
way, Segre combined todays blurred blocs of socialist and capitalist countries, putting
them in relation with a well-balanced matrix of architecture and urbanism, though
recognizing the primacy given to aesthetic and symbolic values of architecture (Segre,
1985: 1317).22 All this Marxist vision was completed by Segre with a historical
conception that distanced itself from the nostalgic and evasive catalogue of forms and
styles throughout which post-modernism had begun to register the past since the
late 1970s. More profound and contextualized was intended to be the operative use of
history claimed by the author in the 1984 preface to the edition of his work in Spain
(Segre, 1985: 15).
Even though the ideological ingredients of that book were too strong, and in spite of its
triumphalism regarding the development of socialist countries, both of which the author
recognized as weaknesses in a recent interview (Almandoz, 2003b: 204), I still believe that
one of the books contributions was to treat in detail the urban structures of the Soviet
countries after the second world war, a subject scarcely addressed in European and North
American texts. For the rest, considering that the Dependence approach had hitherto been
22
Understanding the forms of social space as results of the correlation between (material and spiritual) necessity
and (economic, technical, aesthetical, etc.) possibility, Segre opposed the universal standards about the
aesthetical validity of achievements when studied without concrete references to societies where they are
formulated, namely the social classes, whether the latter are usufructuaries or not of spaces and buildings. My
translation drawn from: la primaca otorgada a los valores esteticos y simbolicos de la arquitectura, cuyo
desarrollo evolutivo mantiene cierta autonoma respecto a los factores estructurales del contexto historico.la
correlacion existente entre necesidad (material y espiritual) y posibilidad (economica, tecnica, estetica,
etc.).los patrones universales sobre la validez estetica de las realizaciones estudiadas sin las referencias
concretas a la sociedad que las formula, o sea, a las clases sociales, usufructuarias o no de espacios o edificios.
113
linked to the above-referred studies on the urbanization process (Castells, 1973; Rofman,
1977) or the historical role of the cities (Kaplan, 1972; Quijano, 1977), it is worth saying
again that Segre was one of the few researchers that made the SoDs last echoes resound in
the space and territory of planning history. However, it was a sort of belated epilogue, not
only because of the exhaustion of the Dependence-oriented analyses by the early 1980s,
but also because of the blurred limits between the capitalist and Soviet blocs after 1989.
As to the general histories of Latin Americas town planning, besides Hardoys
chapters in the collective works that he edited with his North American counterparts
(Schaedel and Hardoy, 1975; Hardoy et al., 1978), Segres books and Ramon Gutierrezs
Arquitectura y urbanismo en Iberoamerica (1983, Fig. 32) stand out as the great treatises
produced within the region. In both of them, the novel historiography of urbanism is
alternated with the more-established periods of architectural history. As in Segres abovereferred works, completed with the compilation Historia de la arquitectura y el
urbanismo: America Latina y Cuba (Segre and others, 1986), in Gutierrezs erudite treaty
some chapters of urban history were included, which constituted the essential reference
for understanding the architectural phenomenon. But beyond this sort of complementary
role, those chapters provided an entity of its own to Latin Americas planning
historiography, in terms of the books chronological and geographical structure, which
was completed by some functional subjects. Even though in the introduction to his book
Gutierrez acknowledged, like Segre, the existence of a cultural dependence that would
be at the basis of many artistic, architectural and planning manifestations of Latin America
as a traditional periphery of the Western civilization that has become part of the
contemporary Third World, he argued that the answers to its necessities would come up,
more than from ideological recipes, from the thorough and specific understanding of its
own and unexplored realities (Gutierrez, 1984: 1112).
Gutierrez (Fig. 33) is a perfect example of a scholar whose work moved from an art
history tradition to that of urban planning studies. He himself acknowledged being
influenced by both Bonet and Hardoy in these respective disciplines. This was made
possible by a formidable education that included, from its early stages, graduate studies in
the sociology programme coordinated by Gino Germani, housing and town planning
courses at the UBA, as well as Lebrets lectures mentioned above, among other
ingredients. At the same time, in order to understand the vast scope of Gutierrezs work,
there must be taken into account three geographic moves that entailed epistemological
shifts. Firstly, leaving Buenos Aires after Juan C. Onganas 1966 coup detat, he settled in
Argentinas remote northeast province, where his focus of interest and academic
perspectives changed; as Gutierrez summarized: From there the task of architectural
history was projected into the urban with a logic more harmonious and less determined by
the architectures monumental episodes (Almandoz, 2004: 248).23 During the 1970s,
under the influence of Eduardo Elliss design workshop and Gordon Cullens readings,
Gutierrez trips throughout the Spanish countryside led him to revaluating vernacular
architecture and rural landscape.
23
My translation of: Desde all la tarea de la historia de la arquitectura se proyecto a lo urbano con una logica
mas armoniosa y menos tenida de la fuerza de los episodios monumentales de la arquitectura.
114
At my return I regarded with different eyes and praised the small towns, the
relationships with landscape, the spatial quality of popular architecture, the simplicity
of solutions and the experience of community spaces. The environmental relation took a
leading role and all that helped to dismantle an education based on encyclopaedic
proposals and the absolute truths of the modern movement (Almandoz, 2004: 248).24
Working for UNESCO between 1974 and 1977 in a programme for recuperating the
heritage and directing graduate courses, the years in Perus Cuzco helped Gutierrez to
understand a profound America that questioned the senses of time, the efficiency and other
deep-rooted premises, what made him glance more intensely and farther, according to his
own testimony (Almandoz, 2004: 248). As in the case of Segre, though from a different
epistemological stance, geographic displacements and the question of conservacion of historic
centresalso present in Hardoy in terms of urban history and in Waisman through the
typology that those centres epitomizeseemed to have led Gutierrez to reach an
intercontinental perspective. Thus, in the last stages of both the SoDs loss of spatiality that
had pervaded Latin Americas social sciences and the CIAMs functionalist utopia in the
professional practice, in the regional treatises of these authors can be recognized a progressive
enlargement and elaboration of architectural space that passed to embrace territorial and town
planning variables. And all of these ingredients resulted in a distinct historiography of
planning.
5.3. Around the 1992 celebrations
Besides the resurface of space and territory prompted by the historical conservacion of
centres and the appearance of Latin American treatises, other geopolitical, institutional
and editorial factors contributed in the 1980s to the interdisciplinary and international
studies within the Iberian American bloc. Especially from the 1970s, Spain had stressed its
role as patron of events on the urban history of Hispanic Americawhose common past
and legacy had been a stronghold of the Franco era which was about to end. Spain also
increased its importance as the regions editorial and translation centre of European and
American text and research books on urban economics, sociology and history.25 As a
24
My translation of: A mi regreso mire con otros ojos y valore los pequenos poblados, las relaciones con el
paisaje, las calidades espaciales de la arquitectura popular, la simpleza de las soluciones y la vivencia de los
espacios comunitarios. La relacion ambiental tomo un papel protagonico y todo ello ayudo a desmontar una
formacion mas basada en propuestas enciclopedistas y en las verdades absolutas del movimiento moderno.
25
In 1982 was held in Madrid, for instance, the Simposio de Urbanismo e Historia Urbana del Mundo Hispanico
(Symposium of Urbanism and Urban History of the Hispanic World), followed by the Seminario sobre la Ciudad
Iberoamericana (Seminar on the Iberian American City), sponsored and organized by CEHOPU in Buenos Aires
in 1985. In terms of publications, it is noteworthy the contribution of Gustavo Gili, an editorial specialized in
architecture, planning, building and topography, whose catalogue includes not only translation of Italian
historiographyBenevolo, Sica, Aymonino and Rossi, among othersbut also classics published in English by
Reissman, Sutcliffe, and other authors. Other classics were gathered in the Ciencia Urbanstica (Town Planning
Science) series, edited by Manuel de Sola-Morales Rubio, with translations by ETSAB. There also were the series
Nuevo Urbanismo (New Urbanism) and Hombre. Sociedad. Ciudad (Man. Society. City), published by the
former Instituto de Estudios de Administracion Local (IEAL, Institute of Local Administration Studies), featuring
titles in urban planning (McLoughlin), sociology (Ledrut, Remy and Voye), economics (Goodall) and history
(Barel, Sica, Muratori).
115
result of the endeavours of Salvador Tarrago and Jose Antonio Fernandez, from the early
1980s the Centro de Estudios Historicos de Obras Publicas (CEHOPU, Centre of
Historical Studies of Public Works) supported initiatives of historians and urban planners
such as Antonio Bonet Correa, Carlos Sambricio, Francisco de Solano and Fernando de
Teran. All these influences and sponsorship would be of great importance for Latin
American scholars such as Hardoy and Gutierrez (Almandoz, 2004: 245), who in turn
benefitedafter the end of the dictatorial cycle that had ended with the defeat in the
Falklands warfrom the renewal of university life in Argentina, which probably was, by
the late 1980s, Latin Americas most mature country in terms of urban historiography.
The old transatlantic platform was thus institutionally and epistemologically
consolidated, now strengthened by the interdisciplinary perspectives of the New History,
the 1992 celebration of the fifth centenary of the Americas Discovery and, last but not
least, Spains bonanza after joining the former ECas had also Portugal, though
economically overshadowed by its neighbour. With a strong geopolitical component
provided by institutions such as the Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional
(AECI, Spanish Agency of International Cooperation), the National Commission of the
fifth centenary and the Union de Ciudades Capitales Iberoamericanas (UCCI, Union of
Iberian Americas capital cities), this new agenda was materialized in a series of collective
works that addressed the urbanization, urban change and town planning for different
periods. Bonets Urbanismo e historia urbana en el mundo hispanoamericano (1985),
Solanos compilations of Historia y futuro de la ciudad iberoamericana (1986) and
Historia urbana de Iberoamerica (1990), as well as Alomars De Teotihuacan a Brasilia
(1987, Fig. 34), stand out as lavish books where, beyond their big format and abundance of
illustrations, a morphological approach blurred the remains of the SoDs economyreductive interpretations. From the other side of the Atlantic, Hardoys and Morses
Repensando la ciudad de America Latina (1988) was another result of an event that
anticipated the fifth centenary;26 although it cannot be considered a book of urban history
as a whole, some of its chapters would have significant influence for the development of
Latin Americas planning history in the 1990s. Without labelling it as book of urban
history either, Nora Clichevskys review of Latin Americas urbanization in the second
half of the 20th century must be singled out too (Clichevsky, 1990: 2178).
After the Seminar about the Iberian American city organized in Buenos Aires in 1985,
also the CEHOPUs programme included the organization of the itinerant exhibition and
later edition of the book La ciudad iberoamericana. El sueno de un orden (1989, Fig. 35).
As it was pointed out in the introduction by its curator, Fernando de Teran, the exhibition
focused on the morphological and functional aspects whose materialization is brought
about by infrastructures, the forms of social organization and the relationship between the
city with its hinterland. Even though this was an emphasis partly explained by the
CEHOPUs nature as a centre focused on infrastructure, it was also indicative of an
emerging Latin American historiography that, after the SoDs economic structuralism,
returned to its spatial, morphological and territorial references. But at the same time,
maturity enabled it to step aside from architecture, which was important only inasmuch as
26
Later translated into English (Hardoy, 1988, 1990).
116
(the latter) contributes to shaping the urban space and characterizing the citys visual
image (Teran, 1997: 14).27 At least concerning the perspective of comparative works, this
was a statement of adulthood by a field that regarded itself as autonomous, and also of
morphological revival by a book that epitomized the new urban historiography prompted
by the 1992 celebrations.
From the 1990s, the development of Latin Americas urban historiography has been
strengthened by national academic networks, at least in the cases of Mexico and Brazil
the latter emerging as the most professional context in this respect.28 Throughout that
decade there also was the proliferation of case studies for different periods,29 that have
been elaborated by a new generation of professionals, most of them architects assimilated
to history, that have surpassed, the chronicle and the antiquarian or morphological stances
of nearly a century ago. While this flowering confirms the vitality of the field that is being
delimited on the local scale, only few works reach the general or comparative perspective,
what is symptomatic of the still-incipient consolidation. Apart from the endless urban
catalogue of case studies, there are few occasions when the broader and more ambitious
study is undertaken, as it has been done, for instance, by Brewer-Caras (1997, Fig. 36) in
relation to the model city resulting from the Law of Indies; or in the compilation of Dois
secolos de pensamento sobre a cidade (Fig. 37), both reference work and textbook where
Vasconcelos (1999) carries a review of the incorporation of the intra-urban as a field of
knowledge within geography.
To a great extent resulting from the myriad of international events and research projects
based in universities, the main problem with this way of growing is its orientation towards
an excessive casuistrynamely urban or national case studies often approached for a
specific period of time. This casuistry is favoured by scattered publications, whose higher
level of aggregation usually are the papers in proceedings and the articles in journals or
compilations. Such a dispersion is paradoxically fuelled by factors related to the way of
production and evaluation in an expanding academia. Gutierrez has well pointed out in this
respect that, after the long-lasting post-ponement of researchmainly due to the lack of
doctoral programmes in Latin Americas architectural schoolsthe pressure drawn from
the parameters of basic sciences to maximize the value of case-study research aimed at
appearing in journals or other periodicals, instead of producing books in Spanish or
Portuguese, can increasingly be felt in the academia (Almandoz, 2004: 249). So, while
progress has certainly been made in relation to articulating national research networks and
27
My translations drawn from: sobre los aspectos morfologicos y funcionales cuya materializacion se produce a
traves de las infraestructuras, las formas de organizacion espacial y las relaciones de la ciudad con el territorio
circundante.La arquitectura es objeto de atencion solamente en la medida en que contribuye a la formacion y
configuracion del espacio urbano y la caracterizacion de la imagen visual de la ciudad.
28
Sponsored by Brazils National Association of Graduate and Research Studies on Urbanism (ANPUR,
Associacao Nacional de Pos-graduacao e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional), the first Seminar on the
History of City and Urbanism was held in Baha (1990), followed by Salvador (1992), Sao Carlos (1994), Rio de
Janeiro (1996), Campinas (1998), Natal (2000), Salvador de Baha (2002) and Niteroi (2004). Urban history has
also been a track in the meetings of Mexicos National Network of Urban Research (RNIU, Red Nacional de
Investigacion Urbana), which has been gathering since the early 1990s.
29
It is not possible to offer here an enumeration that would necessary be incomplete. I have tried to give a
catalogue for the republican period in Almandoz (2003d).
117
consolidating graduate systems, it is increasingly difficult to find research works and

authors that go beyond local case studies or national perspectives for specific topics or
periods at the most.
In spite of the endeavours of Latin Americas academia to adopt the parameters of
North Americas, the latter has been reluctant to recognize the growth and maturity of the
urban and planning historiography developed by their Latino counterparts. Apart from the
gringos short-sighted chauvinism, such an attitude has partly to do with the reductionism
entailed by casuistry. Since, the 1970s there has been groundless assessments about the
allegedly unexplored or fledgling condition of Latin Americas urban historiography,
posed by researchers located out of the region, sometimes when renown publications such
as the Journal of Urban History or the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,
decide to devote an issue or section to the Latin American case (Morse, 1975b: 60;
Guerra, 1989: 606; Armus and Lear, 1998; Torre, 2002), not to mention those journals that
do not even take into account the literature written in Spanish or Portuguese. Those
assertions mirror, on the one hand, the huge gap that persists between both scholarships
and their respective productions in English and Spanish or Portuguese, what is due to
cultural and idiomatic factors alike. On the other, those judgements reproduce the
excusable yet still arrogant ignorance, by North American or European scholars, about
Latin Americas copious production on urban history since the 1960s at leasta
production that we have tried to revisit and set in perspective in this article.
118
6
Conclusions and challenges
Although the research about Latin Americas urban and planning historiography that
this article relies upon is still in progress, there can be drawn some conclusions regarding
the main trends and four episodes identified above, in terms of the historical relationship
with the practices of urbanism and planning.
The first historical approaches to city and planning almost ran parallel to the 1930s
institutionalization of urbanismo in Latin Americas universities and local governments,
which occurred under the predominance of French culture and academic tradition of
design. Initiated at both sides of the Atlantic by, on the one hand, art historians with a
morphological and evolutionist emphasis; and boosted, on the other, by visiting urbanistes
to Latin Americas capitals from the 1930s, the process of transfer and shaping of the
historical component was part of the emerging agenda of urban studies and town planning
in national contexts marked by urbanization and populism. Epitomized by Brunners
Manual de urbanismo and della Paoleras works, the morphology and evolutionism of that
first episode were in consonance with a germinal phase of the discipline in whichas in
the civic studies of Geddes and Mumford, as well as in the evolutionism of Poete, Lavedan
and Bardetepistemology and history were still vital nourishments for the urban design.
CIAMs functionalism provided the professional substratum for Latin Americas postwar shift from urbanismo to planificacion, which also was a geopolitical and cultural
displacement, some of whose epistemological and historical implications would be posed
in the books of Harth-Terre and Randle. The relationship with social sciences and planning
was strengthened with the historical review of Latin Americas unbalanced processes of
industrialization, urbanization and modernization. As a confirmation of the institutional
platform that was also present in the ISIs patronage by the ECLA, the functionalist agenda
of the Latin American city was backed, from the 1950s, by UN and OAS agencies, such as
UNESCO, CLACSO and the SIAP. But the differentiation of urban history was only
possible when local groups of scholars gathered at international events and academic
centres such as ICA, CEUR and CIHE, entering from the 1960s into a phase of
specialization and maturity in which Hardoy and Gasparini, among others, emerged as
continental leaders. In this respect, it must be reminded that, even though the antecedents
of urban historiography in Europe and North America can be traced back to the late 19th
century, its real consolidation took place from the 1960s. So Latin Americas urban
historiography did not emerge much later than in those contexts after all.
Latin Americas shift towards the SoD interpretations was partly prompted by the
malaise ensuing the failure of developmentalism and modernization after the 1960s. Often
combined with the widespread and more significant presence of the Marxist structuralism
in the Latin American academia, the SoD paid great attention to political, social and
economic variables of the process of urbanization, but did not manage to incorporate the
space and territory into the analysis. Only Segre could be regarded as the Marxist historian
that tried to maintain a regional and urban scale throughout the prolonged years dominated
by the Dependence approach.
119
A return to the architectural and morphological roots of Latin Americas planning

historiography was prefigured through different ways. From the 1970s, issues such as the
conservacion of historic centres and the entorno of architecture were announced in Segres
books, theorized by Waissman, and later feed-backed the emergence of Gutierrezs text,
all of which were very close to architectural historiography. On the basis of new
institutions (AECI, UCCI, CEHOPU) and publications prepared for the 1992 fifth
centenary, mainly sponsored Spains boom after joining the EC, the reinsertion of the
urban space was completed from the 1980s through a new morphology resulting from
the interaction between Latin American and Iberian scholars. From then on, the balance of
the myriad of case studies with comparative or general perspectives has become the major
challenge of Latin Americas urban historiography.
Confirming that the morphological ingredient had predominated in Latin Americas
urban historiography, as a consequence of a formalist vision of art history and,
concurrently, of the model-oriented mentality of the modern movement, Gutierrez has
also pointed out that the original architectural conception has been enhanced by other
trends and components of urban studies in general, especially those required by the
participative planning that is indispensable in Latin Americas dynamic urban reality. So
that studies about the everyday life, about the articulation of social groups, about the role
of neighbourhoods and communities have considerably enriched the urban history
(Almandoz, 2004: 246),30 while reconstructing a political and social micro-history that
enables town planning to resume its local, spatial and urbansticos origins. Even though I
agree with Gutierrez regarding the morphological predominance of Latin Americas
planning historiography in the initial and final episodes considered in this article, I believe
that the agenda of the field has not become as wide as it should be in order to incorporate
fundamental subjects of this part of the Third World. Amongst them, urban poverty and
shanty towns stand as dramatic examples of an unwritten history that is perhaps the most
urgent chapter that Latin Americas planning historiography must tackle, at least in
relation to the practice of the discipline.
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Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81123

Urban planning and historiography in Latin America*

Abbreviations AECI, Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional (Spanish Agency of International

A. Almandoz / Progress in Planning 65 (2006) 81123

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influenced planificacion. In the heyday of vernacular modernisms, the emergence of a

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Translated into Spanish almost twenty years later (Mumford, 1957).

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Initially regarded as promising examples of developing countriesa category that

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representative of the more-comprehensive professional that the planificateur was supposed to

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promoted by Patricio Randle in Argentina; the Catholic University of Chiles Instituto de

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America Latina (1973, Fig. 23), and by Schteingart in Urbanizacion y dependencia en

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By contrast to the SoDs structuralism, Randles interesting interpretation of urban

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Later translated into English (Hardoy, 1988, 1990).

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consolidating graduate systems, it is increasingly difficult to find research works and

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A return to the architectural and morphological roots of Latin Americas planning

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Almandoz, A. (2003c) De Fustel de Coulanges a Lewis Mumford. Encuadre historiografico de antecedentes de

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