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Urbanization in the Caribbean Basin: Social Change during the Years of the Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Alejandro Portes ,
José Itzigsohn  and
Carlos Dore-Cabral
Alejandro Portes
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
José Itzigsohn
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
Carlos Dore-Cabral
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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This article seeks to examine empirically several recent hypotheses on the evolution of Latin American urbanization based on data from five countries in the Caribbean Basin. The hypotheses were advanced by the senior author in an earlier article in this journal (Portes 1989). They concern three major aspects discussed in the literature on Latin American cities: changes in urban primacy, spatial polarization within the largest cities, and the urban informal economy as a countercyclical mechanism. The hypotheses contradict much of the scholarly consensus on the character of Latin American urbanization as summarized in a number of publications (Beyer 1967; Hardoy 1975; Portes and Walton 1976; Roberts 1978; Portes and Johns 1989).

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , 1994 , pp. 3 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

The research reported here was conducted with the support of grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The project was a collaborative effort by institutions and research teams in each of the countries studied. Extensive reports prepared by each country team form the bases for this summary article. The project directors and institutions involved are Mario Lungo, Consejo Superior Universitario de Centroamérica (CSUCA), Costa Rica; Wilfredo Lozano, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), the Dominican Republic; Juan Pablo Pérez-Sáinz, FLACSO, Guatemala; Sabine Manigat, National University of the Republic, Haiti; and Derek Gordon and Patricia Anderson, University of the West Indies, Jamaica. None of them bear responsibility for the analysis presented here. This article is dedicated to the memory of Derek Gordon.

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