Latin American and Caribbean Urban Development

The new development agendas confirmed in the year 2015 evidence an increased global interest in cities and urban challenges. In Latin America and the Caribbean, cities have long been an established topic of study and debate. This exploration gives a brief overview of current research on urban development in the region and suggests fruitful avenues for future research. Following different ideological trends in twentieth-century urban studies, we currently see more pragmatic frameworks and a belief in technocratic solutions. Some scholars consider Latin American and Caribbean cities to be the world’s new signposts in urban development, given their role as sites of innovations in politics, architecture and urban design;
we see potential here for urban scholars of the region to move beyond technocratic language.
In addition, we argue for an area studies approach to these cities that uses the framework
of the region as a heuristic device to unsettle global urbanist epistemologies that privilege
North-to-South mobilities in both policy and theory.