THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

In many ways, Latin American cities look very similar. They are all highly unequal and contain wide extremes of poverty and affluence. Urban sprawl has produced almost identical suburbs, so that it is difficult to tell either the shanty towns or the high-income residential areas in one city from those in another. The ubiquitous bootblack, street vendor and beggar frequent the central streets of every major city along with elegantly dressed business people and government workers. Traffic congestion, skyscrapers and street children are found everywhere.

At the same time, every Latin American city is different. The look and feel of Tijuana. Oaxaca. Salvador. Buenos Aires and Lima reflect major differences in culture, climate, poverty and economic function. While I feel that there are enough bonds linking this range of places together to justify writing a book entitled the Latin American City. I want to begin by emphasising their diversity.

The following descriptions of five Latin American cities show the differences that exist across the region. The descriptions include cities from Mexico in the north through Spanish South America to Portuguese-speaking Brazil. La Paz, with its poor, indigenous population living up in the clouds is the archetypal Andean city. Rio de Janeiro with its cultural kaleidoscope, its beaches and sunshine, its life and glamour is in a very different world. Bogotá is different again; a poor city but, unlike most in Latin America, one that became no poorer during the 1980s. Caracas, with its motorways and skyscrapers, looks very much like a North American city; only its hillsides full of shanty towns remind visitors that it most certainly is not. Finally, Guadalajara, seemingly a pearl of Mexican tidiness and civility, stands in apparent contradiction to the patent disorder so obvious in the other cities. Is the real Latin America shown best by the social tranquillity of Guadalajara or in the bubbling unpredictability of Rio de Janeiro? Is the economic resilience of Bogotá the norm, or the dire poverty of La Paz?

Santafé de Bogotá

Flying into Bogotá means crossing the Andes. Below, the green, undulating slopes of the eastern cordillera are covered by the small coffee farms that for so long sustained the Colombian economy. Then, about forty miles from the airport, the landscape changes; a flat plateau spreads out surrounded by a ring of mountains. Coffee cultivation gives way to dairy farming and to fields of maize, potatoes and vegetables. Plastic greenhouses are everywhere, accommodating Colombia's newest boom product, fresh-cut flowers. In a few miles, the climate has changed from semi-tropical to temperate.

Bogotá huddles against the eastern rim of mountains, with the sabana stretching out in three directions. On top of the mountains, two thousand feet above the centre of the city are two great religious symbols, the convent of Monserrate and the giant statue of Guadalupe. These monuments to piety once dominated the whole city. Today, they can still be seen from most parts of Bogotá, even if their religious significance has undoubtedly declined. Unlike Caracas or Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá has few physical constraints on its expansion.

Located at 8,600 feet, Bogotá's climate is cool and it rains frequently. Colombians from other parts of the country say that the climate matches the cachaco persona: cool and reserved. The city is grey, lacking the warmth of the coastal areas, the vibrancy of the coffee regions, the colour of the Cauca valley. These comments reveal the stereotypes that are embedded in Colombian regional sentiment. The images are real but misleading in an important respect: Bogotá is no longer a regional centre. Today, it is the most Colombian of cities for the simple reason that it is full of migrants from other parts of the country.

Like most large Latin American cities, Bogotá has grown rapidly. In 1938 it had 350,000 people, by 1964 it had 1.7 million, today it has 5.2 million. In little more than fifty years its population has grown around fifteen fold. Migration from the countryside began in a big way in the 1930s, magnified by the rural violence that has been such a recurrent theme in Colombian political life. People came from every part of the country, although the bulk of the new arrivals came from the two nearby departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá. Today, fewer than half of the inhabitants were born outside the city, the consequence of earlier migrants bearing their children in the alien urban environment. Migrants continue to arrive in the city, but the pace of urban growth has slowed down. Between 1973 and 1985 Bogotá's population grew annually by only three per cent.

From a distance, Bogotá looks anything but the supposedly impoverished Latin American metropolis. The skyscrapers and office blocks of the central city are dwarfed by the backcloth of mountains. From the airport the visitor travelling to the centre of town passes modern factories and the local offices of world-famous companies. Overpasses take traffic across the four-lane motorway. If many of the cars are less than smart, the Mazdas and Renaults which dominate the traffic are recognisably modern vehicles. On arrival at the Tequendama hotel, it is likely that the traveller has seen little in the way of poverty.

Looking out from the hotel window in the morning, there are few signs of shanties. Most of the buildings are solidly constructed and only later does one notice the distant flanks of the mountains with their higgledy-piggledy housing, clearly too small and untidy to be middle-class. But self-help housing in Bogotá, even though it houses most of the people, is not flimsy. At night the climate is sufficiently cold to guarantee that most homes have solid walls. When I first went to the city it took me a week to find a 'proper' shanty town.

But few visitors go to the low-income areas of the city. They mainly stay in the central area and travel to the sanitised northern suburbs. Around the Country Club and the Unicentro shopping mall, the large areas of expensive housing give off a reassuring feel of affluence. Of course, there are some poor people on the streets, pulling hand carts containing recycled refuse, cleaning shoes and selling newspapers; they can be seen looking out of the overcrowded buses passing through. But they impinge little on the scene. The north of Bogotá is typical of the way that Latin American elites have managed to create areas of 'modernity' amidst vast surrounding expanses of poverty.

Should the visitor move further north or travel to the segregated south of the city, a different world appears. The shops are smaller and offer a more limited range of goods. The streets in the commercial centres contain different kinds of people. They speak the same language and they are dressed in 'proper' clothes, but they are darker, smaller, and obviously much poorer. Take the bus to the end of the route, and the urban environment deteriorates. The road...