LATA 4385

Building, Inhabiting, Destroying Urban Latin America

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2017-2018.

Today, Latin America is the most urbanized region in the world, with about 80% of Latin Americans living in urban centers. Only a century ago, however, Latin America was predominantly rural, with 80% of the population residing in the region's vast and varied rural areas. How did this dramatic change happen? What had to be built or destroyed, materially and ideologically, to make the continuous growth of cities possible? What were the political and social strategies of recent urban inhabitants and working people to accommodate to and transform the ostensibly frenetic, and often turbulent, process of urban growth? This course will address these questions from a historical perspective, by drawing on historical monographs, anthropological studies, architectural histories, planning proposals, political texts, development reports, and films. We will focus on the social, economic, and political practices that transformed the Latin American urban world, from the "Europeanized" cities of the turn of the century to today's megalopolises, as well as on the ideological and theoretical frameworks set up to grasp and, thus, reshape the persistent process of urbanization over the course of the century.

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