The Consolidation of the Latin American City and the Undermining of Social Cohesion

Introduction

This paper examines urban social disorganization, its empirical referents, and its impact on social cohesion in two time periods in Latin American cities. One is the period of rapid urbanization between 1950s and 1980s based on high levels of rural–urban migration. The second is the period after the 1980s when rural–urban migration ceases to be a significant factor in urban growth, and in which there is a certain consolidation of the built environment. In both the periods, both outsiders and their inhabitants have perceived Latin American cities as disorganized. In the first period, the disorganization was identified with uncontrollable growth based on rural migrations resulting in a marginal mass unable to adapt to urban culture or politics (cf. Roberts 1978). In the second period of urbanization, crime and violence are perceived as the major forms of disorder in Latin American cities. In both the periods, these perceptions were incorrect and/or exaggerated. Levels of crime and violence are at present unusually high in Latin American cities, but many have lower levels of homicide than some US cities. ¹ Nevertheless, as Sampson (2009) points out, perceptions of disorder matter and can become factors in perpetuating decline at the neighborhood level.

The Latin American urban experience of disorganization is different, I argue, from that portrayed in the twentieth–century literature on urban social disorganization in the United States. To understand the significance of these differences between the United States and Latin American experiences, we need to review in brief the United States’ approach to urban social disorganization. In both the periods in Latin America, the same structural factors associated with social disorganization in the United States literature—population mobility, poverty, and social heterogeneity—were present, but, I will argue, social disorganization in cities of Latin America had a different significance for behavior. Compared to the United States, these aspects of social disorganization created new personal and community level bases of order and cohesion.

Disorganization is a basic theme in the earliest analyses of the characteristics of the modern city, which sought to identify the intrinsic challenges to social cohesion associated with the size, density, population mobility, and fleeting interactions of the modern city (Simmel [1903] 1971). Simmel's concerns were to be reflected in the empirical research of the Chicago School of Sociology, first laid out in Robert Park's (1915) research program for the “The City” and given theoretical underpinning in Louis Wirth's (1938) article “Urbanism as a way of Life.” A major research issue for Park was that of social disorganization arising from the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening of the restraints of the primary group, which Park (1915, p. 595) saw as largely responsible for the increase of vice and crime in great cities. This issue became a standard theme in US urban sociology after the publication of Shaw and McKay's (1942) Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. In that study, disorganization was measured by low socioeconomic status, population mobility, and ethnic diversity. Subsequent studies added family disruption and urban/suburban differences as factors associated with crime, and emphasized the importance of neighborhood through the mediating effects of local social networks and membership in associations (Sampson and Groves 1989).

Residues of older forms of cohesion remained to enable urban populations to cope with the impersonality and the economic and social segmentation of the large metropolis. In the United States, this form of order often emerged on the basis of ethnicity, as when inhabitants of even poor urban neighborhoods developed their own identity though their language, culture, and norms of behavior (Hannerz 1969; Suttles 1974). Both the quantitative and qualitative studies of disorganization/cohesion at the local level emphasized the reinforcing effect of the neighborhood's social and economic environment on people's capacity to cope. Wilson's (1990) study of The Truly Disadvantaged argued that the abandonment of the inner cities by middle–class African Americans created an impoverished material and social environment that added to the disadvantages of the low–income populations left behind.

There have been important disagreements in the United States literature over the weight to be given to structural factors, such as occupational shifts or racism, rather than local cultures or group–specific patterns, such as single parent families or youth gangs, in explaining the outcomes of social disorganization such as crime (Massey and Sampson 2009). ² But despite differences in the interpretation of what or who is to blame, the United States literature has tended to see disorganization at the opposite end of the continuum from order and cohesion. I argue that in the Latin American case, disorganization has often had a more positive role, stimulating reorganization and new forms of cohesion.

I follow Chan et al. (2006) in defining social cohesion as a state, not a process, and one based on both subjective and objective components. Horizontally, social cohesion arises between neighbors, expressed in a willingness to cooperate with them and other city dwellers in like situation, and in a sense of shared identity. This becomes the basis of collective efficacy. Vertically, social cohesion is based on trust in public figures and confidence in political and other major social institutions, along with organizing with others throughout the city, and political participation in elections or national organizations. Horizontal bridging links are the basis of grassroots mobilization, whereas vertical bridging links are more likely to result in top–down mobilization.

At first sight, it would seem as if disorganization is inherently antithetical to social cohesion because it threatens stable relations and creates uncertainty that can weaken participation and limit trust in others. But disorganization can be a source of order, as when neighbors band together in the face of lack of services or secure titles to their housing; also, disorganization as perceived by the outsider may seem as cohesion to the insider, as in the case of youth gangs in both the United States and Latin America (Jones and Rodgers 2009).

I consider both social disorganization and social cohesion in Latin American cities in terms of three structural processes that are akin to those considered in the United States literature. The first is population mobility, and the extent to which it poses a challenge to a city's established order. The second is the social heterogeneity of the city as it grows and consolidates, particularly the nature of residential segregation. The third is economic inequality, as manifested in the labor market in the changing balance between formal and informal economies, and in the internal logic of each. Note the differences between the structural processes that I identify and those emphasized in the United States research. Population mobility in Northern and Southern cities is similar. The degree of spatial segregation bears some relation to ethnic heterogeneity, particularly if social class is also considered. However, the economic variable—formal and informal economy—differs from the low socioeconomic status variable favored in the United States research. Workers and families in the informal economy of Latin America are likely to be poorer and have more insecure jobs than those in the formal economy. But significantly for social cohesion, the formal/informal distinction is also one between types of work relationships, with informal workers more reliant on family, friendship, and neighborhood relationships as the basis of their jobs.

This last difference is consequential, but I argue that the major difference is that of the overall context of urban growth. Whereas migrants in the United States came to cities where they had to compete with each other in the market for both housing and jobs, in Latin America, migrants initially provided their own housing through self–construction and many found their own jobs through self– and family employment.

The First Period

Population mobility in Latin American cities changed from an urban growth that drew heavily on rural–urban migration to an urban growth that is predominantly based on urban natural increase, with interurban and intrametropolitan migration replacing rural–urban migration as the major sources of net population increase or decrease within the city. Jaime Sobrino's (2010) analysis of urban growth in Mexico from 1900 to 2000 shows clearly that Mexican cities grow mainly by in–migration in their early periods of growth.

This change in growth pattern has some basic social implications. If a city grows mainly through migration, then it grows through the addition of an economically active population. Children may accompany their parents, but the migrating household will immediately need shelter and employment. If, in contrast, a city grows mainly by natural increase, then it grows through the addition of babies, who can be incorporated into existing households and whose demands for housing and employment come later, when the children become adults, and will have the time and urban experience to search out, individually, new accommodation or jobs.

The first type of growth is likely to be the more challenging one for both the perceptions and the empirical referents of urban disorganization. Migrants are easily identified and stereotyped, particularly when they come from rural areas and are illiterate or have low levels of education. Incoming migrants who are economically active individuals have an urgent need to find secure accommodation where they and their families can live. Until they get stable jobs, they are in constant fear of not being able to pay the rent (Roberts 1973). Large numbers of migrants seeking cheap and secure accommodation powered the growth of irregular, self–built settlements in the cities of Latin America. Migration is a source of perceived and real urban disorder as land is invaded, as settlements arise wherever cheap land could be found, and as residents collectively lobby governments for urban infrastructure.

But disorganization is also a source of order. Many migrants came as extended families and originated from the same village or region of the country. As Lomnitz (1977) describes in Mexico City, this gave them a basis for trust and solidarity in the city, and for coordinating their actions. In Lima, regional associations based on villages of origin proliferated in the city, enabling migrants to find work and shelter (Doughty 1997). Even where there are relatively few preexisting ties of solidarity, the coordinated efforts required to make irregular settlements inhabitable created trust among neighbors and effective community organizations, as I showed in my Guatemala City study (Roberts 1973).

Urban growth followed what Kowarick (1977) described as the “Logic of Disorder” where cities developed spatially according to the rationale of an imperfect market. Inadequate transport and the relative absence, compared to the United States, of a large middle class meant that there was no market in Latin America for the kind of middle–class, low–density suburbanization that developed in the United States. The consequence was a high degree of social heterogeneity in the centers of the Latin American cities, where levels of residential segregation by class and ethnicity were lower than in the United States. Even the wealthy lived in relative proximity to the poor (Roberts and Wilson 2009). On the periphery, in contrast, there arose a growing concentration of low–income settlement, which created a socially homogeneous pattern of residential segregation.

The spatial disorganization of the city in the early period was heightened by the proliferation of informal economic activities in small workshops, domestic production, and street trade. There was a synergy between informal housing arrangements and informal economic activity: self–constructed housing would be adapted to a workshop, petty commerce, and other domestic economic activities. The state was absent to prevent informal economies or settlements. Zoning was not usually applied so neighborhoods were disordered by industrial noise, and by the flow of industrial and commercial activities.

In the early period of urbanization, half or more of the economically active population worked informally, whether measured by the low productivity of their activities in self–employment, or small–scale enterprise, or by the absence of state regulation (Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989; Tokman 1991). In the period of early urbanization, the informal sector was a dynamic sector occupying the niches left by the regulated formal sector. Small shops and street peddlers sold to formal sector workers. Tailors, shoemakers, mechanics, and other repair specialists offered customized products and services for a low–income market, whereas large–scale enterprises produced more standardized products on an assembly line. Some large–scale enterprises put out work to small workshops. Building laborers might have formal jobs, such as with the municipality, but also offered their services to help people self–construct their houses.

Earnings were less in the informal sector, but the informal sector facilitated family enterprise and family labor. It was common for households to contain workers in both formal and informal sectors, and for all to benefit from the social security coverage that came from formal employment. Perceptions of the informal economy were, on the whole, positive. Economists and international organizations stressed the need to improve the productivity of small–scale enterprise and expressed concern about child labor, but the informal economy was not seen as a “black” economy. To most city dwellers, the informal economy was perceived as a normal part of the urban economy despite its disorder. There were exceptions. Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and, to a lesser extent, Santiago had relatively small informal economies in the 1960s and 1970s, and their economies were dominated by government and formal unionized enterprises.

A centripetal migration pattern, the pressure on people to create their own shelter, and the close relations between workers in the formal and informal sector mean that trust in proximate others, and identification with others in a like situation was relatively high in the first period of urbanization. Over time, a certain pride developed among residents in being “pobladores” or “favelados” despite felt discrimination by outsiders. Participation in neighborhood committees was high, and these were committees created by the residents, not by outside agencies. The number of gains that residents obtained by their concerted action was considerable—building churches and chapels, building community centers, installing a sewage system, installing running water and electricity, garbage collection, title to land, and so on (Dosh 2010). Settlers stayed in the homes and neighborhoods that they established. In the squatter settlement that I first studied in 1966, the average length of residence of heads of household resurveyed in 2009 is over 30 years (Roberts 2010). These low–income settlements were not “zones of transition” like the slums of first settlement in the United States from which immigrants moved quickly.

In contrast, the first period saw little progress on the vertical dimension of cohesion. In many cities of Latin America, the state was relatively absent from low–income settlements, without a police or administrative presence. The nearest that most low–income settlements came to relations with the state was through political parties and then mainly at election time. In Mexico, it was not the Mexican government but the official party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) that dealt clientelistically with low–income neighborhoods, providing infrastructure or handouts in return for political support at rallies and in elections. The same was true of the Peronist party in Argentina, where such practices continue to this day (Auyero 2001).

The Second Period

Internal migration in Latin America is essentially centrifugal in the second period. Many Latin American central cities are losing population to the suburbs as densely populated lower income inner city areas are redeveloped for commerce and higher end housing. This, when added to the new generations of family members who cannot be accommodated in the original house, means a substantial movement out of the city. The loss of population from the inner city is only part of the inner city's population movement because there is also a continuous inflow of migrants from other urban or rural areas. These will often have different characteristics from those who move out—having, for example, higher socioeconomic status, as Duhau (2003) shows for the Mexico City Metropolitan area. The new types of urban migration are thus likely to increase heterogeneity and weaken older bases of solidarity at the neighborhood level.

Urban space is now being reorganized by global market forces and state intervention to a greater extent than in the past. The major Latin American cities have become targets for substantial foreign direct investments aimed at commercial and service developments, and high–end residential complexes. Coupled with improvements in road and transport infrastructure, this has made possible two new forms of spatial development. The first is a transport/road centered development of shopping malls, such as those on the Periferico of Mexico City and Santiago's new circular road system. The second is the well–known phenomenon of gated communities (Caldeira 1999). The gated communities, which at times are enclosed townships, protect themselves from the poverty around them by their walls and gates, but make use of the services of the low–income populations, and have easy access via the new transport routes to the mall complexes or the new service industries located either in the center or at transport nodes. This is the pattern of small–scale segregation described by Sabatini, Cerda, and Caceres (2001), which marginally dilutes the large–scale segregation of the peripheral settlements of homogeneous poverty. These settlements have grown rapidly, thereby extending the circumference of the metropolitan area, and increasing the journey to work. During the day, a poor peripheral neighborhood is left to the elderly and many unemployed youth.

The change in spatial segregation presents a new form of urban disorganization. Gated communities and malls are islands of privilege in the urban landscape, which are unlikely to contribute to or be interested in the overall security of the city. Private security abounds, and private rather than public spaces are defended and enhanced. Increasingly, spatially marginal and unplanned low–income settlements are populated piece–meal by those looking for cheap accommodation. Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, becomes a visible phenomenon in many low–income settlements, particularly the peripheral ones that have no proximate sources of employment, and where adults are away at work for most of the day. This situation increases the likelihood of gang formation and violence (Jones and Rodgers 2009). Organized drug crime is also more likely to be found in unplanned and socially isolated poor neighborhoods, where a maze of narrow streets shields drug trafficking from outside scrutiny. Drug related violence generates a general sense of insecurity, undermining family and community cohesion.

Low–income settlements have less of a spatial basis for solidarity and for ordering their environment than did the irregular settlements of the first phase of urbanization. Then inhabitants had a common interest in defending the land they had obtained, housing they built or improved, and utilities they provided for the neighborhood. Administrative decentralization has placed more decision–making power at the local level, but without providing the resources needed to meet the local demands for local participation. In this context, politics are heavily local and citywide urban movements now often reflect citizen concern with rights, whether over the environment, gender equality, or security rather than labor or housing demands (Roberts and Portes 2006).

In the second period of urbanization, free market policies and deregulations affect both formal and informal economies. Their overall impact is to subject both formal and informal sectors to competition from cheap imports from abroad, particularly Asia. Foreign direct investment in malls and supermarkets began to displace street peddling. In Lima, street sellers decreased from 10 percent to almost 3 percent of the working population from 2004 to 2006 (Roever and Aliaga 2008). Consequently, many of the key sectors of employment in the informal sector begin to disappear. Employment in the formal sector is deregulated, and the 1990s saw increases in both intra– and intersectoral pay inequalities (Pérez Saínz 2005). This results in greater job insecurity for many, and a more polarized income distribution, which only began to diminish in the first decade of the new century (López–Calva and Lustig 2010; Spagnola 2011).

The overall impact of these changes results in two linked phenomena. One is the weakening of the neighborhood economy as a means of providing a basic subsistence to low–income families. Local activities, including street selling and home industries, are less viable than they were. The second is the criminalization of the informal economy. In the earlier period, people perceived informal and formal sectors as distinct but legitimate ways of earning income. In the contemporary period, the perception of the informal economy is now more likely to be in terms of its illegality. This is partly because of the rise of drug consumption within Latin American cities, fueled by rising incomes, and as a side product of the changes in drug trafficking (Briceño–León and Zubillaga 2002). The selling of drugs in Latin American cities is a labor–intensive industry, involving large numbers of casual workers on street corners or transporting drugs from one part of a city to another. Strictly illegal activities such as drug trafficking and contraband sales are a minority of activities within the contemporary informal sector, because petty commerce or small–scale craft workshops catering to low–income populations remain important. But illegal activities are the activities that get the attention of the media and other observers.

In the second period, horizontal cohesion is likely to have diminished. There is no longer an ongoing need for neighbors to work together to improve their living situation. Housing searches are more individualistic, as family members seek out already existing accommodation to meet their needs and budgets. It is also clear that the climate of insecurity is undermining trust in others, and the willingness to work with others, as Janice Perlman reports in her restudy of four irregular settlements in Rio de Janeiro (Perlman 2010).

On the vertical dimension of cohesion, there have been substantial changes. Opinion polls show that people continue to have low faith in government, political parties, and most institutions except churches and universities. There is little respect for the police or the judiciary. ³ But low–income residents are now in more frequent contact with external institutions than they were in the past. Nongovernmental development and social service organizations proliferate in most Latin American low–income settlements. Also, government ministries in most Latin American countries now have social programs that bring them into direct contact with low–income populations, such as Oportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Familia in Brazil. ⁴

The urban poor are thus enmeshed in a variety of external relations in the modern Latin American city. These relations, however, are individual, not collective. Initiatives promoting local participation come mainly from above, rather than responding to the organized demand making of low–income populations. Citywide grassroots alliances to demand housing security and improved infrastructure are less common than in the past. There is perhaps more of a sense of individual citizenship and rights than in the past, but also less local community solidarity and capacity to act collectively (Roberts and Portes 2005).

Conclusion

The factors associated with social disorganization in US cities were the basis of local social order in the early stages of Latin American urbanization. Rural migrants, most of whom were poor, brought social diversity to the cities. But unlike in the early stages of growth of the United States cities, they collaborated with each other rather than competed or fled. Also, family labor and extended family unity were important shared resources for coping with poverty. The difference with the United States experience recalls Castells’ (1976) observation that what the Chicago School identified as general features of urban life were in fact characteristics of capitalism, such as market–based competition. Latin American cities were unevenly capitalist in the early stages of urbanization; it was only in the second period of urbanization that they began to approximate the free market cities typical in the United States (Portes and Roberts 2005).

Even in the second, contemporary period of Latin American urbanization when cities and their inhabitants are more closely subject to the disorganizing forces of the global market, new forms of reorganization and cohesion are likely to occur. These are priorities for future research. Educational levels and consumption standards have risen even in the poorest neighborhoods. Households possess a range of electronic goods and the capacity to manage them, something unimaginable 40 years ago. They are now closely integrated into citywide and international standards of consumption. This type of integration may generate an individualistic view of rights, but it can also lead to collective concerns with the environment. The new forms of migration can promote family cohesion as well as break up, as when remittances and cellular phones sustain family ties.

The major threat to the development of new forms of social cohesion is not family breakdown, poverty, and individual mobility nor ethnic or class competition, but drug trafficking, and the violence and sense of insecurity that it generates. This is an international issue and not simply one that can be resolved at the local level. At the local level, more research is needed on the geographical distribution of violence and drug trafficking, and on the types of neighborhood where they concentrate. Gangs are not equally prevalent or violent in Latin American cities, and even in those cities where gangs are prevalent, such as Guatemala, membership for those that survive is only one part of the life cycle. Understanding how neighbors learn to live with insecurity, and how best to help them is another research priority. By focusing on the reorganization of urban social life and new forms of social cohesion occurring in the face of the powerful contemporary forces disorganizing Latin American cities, we may be able to identify policies that build upon and strengthen existing community–level initiatives.