New World Cities

Challenges of Urbanization and Globalization in the Americas

John Tutino, Martin V. Melosi, John Tutino, Martin V. Melosi

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469648767
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

For millennia, urban centers were pivots of power and trade that ruled and linked rural majorities. After 1950, explosive urbanization led to unprecedented urban majorities around the world. That transformation--inextricably tied to rising globalization--changed almost everything for nearly everybody: production, politics, and daily lives. In this book, seven eminent scholars look at the similar but nevertheless divergent courses taken by Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Houston in the twentieth century, attending to the challenges of rapid growth, the gains and limits of popular politics, and the profound local effects of a swiftly modernizing, globalizing economy. By exploring the rise of these six cities across five nations, New World Cities investigates the complexities of power and prosperity, difficulty and desperation, while reckoning with the social, cultural, and ethnic dynamics that mark all metropolitan areas. Contributors: Michele Dagenais, Mark Healey, Martin V. Melosi, Bryan McCann, Joseph A. Pratt, George J. Sanchez, and John Tutino.

1 The Americas in the Twentieth-Century World

Challenges of Urbanization and Globalization

JOHN TUTINO

Rapid urbanization reshaped lives across the Americas and the world during the second half of the twentieth century—a transformation at the heart of the accelerating transnational integration we call globalization. Cities everywhere faced trying challenges: soaring population growth, limited economic possibilities, difficulty providing employment, infrastructure, and services to burgeoning numbers—and the pressures of popular groups demanding better. The voices promoting globalization in the 1990s promised economic growth and shared prosperity. Growth has proven uneven, prosperity rarely shared. As the dream became realities shaped by concentrating wealth, uncertain popular gains, and widening insecurities, new challenges have arisen—often political, too often violent. The promise, power, and creativity of globalization concentrate in great cities. So do too much poverty and marginality, political frustration, and social violence. As the twenty-first century began, the vastly expanded population of a rapidly integrating world increasingly lived in cities defined by deepening polarizations. Great metropolitan regions concentrate power and promise—and burgeoning populations facing dependence and poverty, marginality and exclusion.

If we recognize that the inequities of globalization and the inequities of urbanization came together in one historical transformation, we must work to understand their inseparable dynamics if we are to begin to think about a world—and cities—of more shared prosperity, real justice, and effective participation. The inevitability of inequities is often emphasized. Yet our studies and many others show that some cities have generated greater opportunities for more of their people while others seem to promulgate desperation. The question is: how have cities found more or less success building economies, sharing limited wealth, providing essential services, and responding to popular demands?

This chapter offers an outline of the history of the Americas and our six cities as they developed within a changing global economy, focusing on twentieth-century transformations. It provides a framework for understanding the economic, infrastructural, social, and political challenges faced by New World cities, thus providing a context for analyzing the popular participations that aimed to address them with often real yet always limited successes.1 The goal is to open conversations linking global processes, urban challenges, popular politics, and everyday lives.

Globalizing History

In recent decades, understandings of the long trajectory of global economic history have changed radically, enabling more complex visions of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution and the recent turn to globalization—contexts essential to analyzing contemporary urbanization. After a long era in which most analysts presumed an inevitable rise of the West, meaning Western Europe and its Anglo-American offspring, a new global history is taking shape. Scholars now recognize that China and South Asia led global production and centered world trades around 1500. The incorporation of the Americas, their silver and sugar, and the trades they stimulated after 1550 drove a long era of commercial integration in which European primacy was a late development. Only after 1800 did an industrial capitalism led by British textiles (grounded in a parallel expansion of slave-based production of raw cotton in the U.S. South) take center stage. Mechanized production concentrated in northwest Europe and the northeastern United States, pressing the rest of the world to sell raw materials and buy finished wares. A long nineteenth century (1800–1930) saw Western dominance grounded in industrial production, expanding global trades, consolidating national states in Europe and the Americas, and new empires that enabled European penetration of Africa, South Asia, and the Islamic world.2

Yet the world built in the nineteenth century began to crack in the early twentieth. After 1910, the industrial hegemons pummeled each other in the Great War, while revolutions in Mexico and Russia looked for new routes forward. The Great Depression of the 1930s broke the first industrial world economy. Another World War and a global Cold War sent nations across the globe in pursuit of national development focused on local resources, production, labor, and markets. In capitalist and socialist variants, visions of national industrialization offered utopias in which all would share in benefits gained only by a favored few in the long century of Anglo-led industrial capitalism. National development spread industrial ways across the world between 1930 and 1970. The model remained Western: promoters of development, capitalist and socialist, presumed the primacy of Western ways. Claims of Western cultural and institutional primacy, promoted by Max Weber in the late nineteenth century, were reformulated after World War II by Walt Rostow, Douglass North, and others offering formulas for national success.3 Promoters of socialism adapted Karl Marx’s equally Western vision in recipes for socialist development.4 Into the 1980s, presumptions of Western primacy in technological innovation and economic success were everywhere—tied to promises that if they were adopted, all could prosper.

We will never know whether the mid-twentieth-century promise of national development and shared welfare was a possible dream or an impossible utopia. Beginning in the 1960s and culminating in the 1980s, nations pursuing national development faced mounting debt crises that forced “structural adjustments”—simply said, they could not fund national development, capitalist or socialist; few, if any, could keep promises of popular welfare. Endless ink blamed bad planning and too much populism, too much commitment to popular welfare (conceding that the model had failed in its proclaimed goal of shared prosperity). Our studies of the challenges of urbanization suggest that whatever the quality of nations’ and cities’ planning and the effectiveness of their politics, global processes were fundamental to beginning and then bringing down national development projects—at least in the Americas.

The rise of industrial capitalism after 1815 concentrated industrial production and imperial power in Britain, sustained by a United States that supplied slave-made cotton—and in time used its continental resources to become a competitor after 1870. Facing a United States with resource advantages, Britain and France (and to a lesser extent Germany and Italy) tried to compete by expanding empires in Africa and South Asia. Accelerating competition among European powers led after 1910 to war in Europe and revolutions in Mexico and Russia.5 That decade of conflict led to global depression in the 1930s, global war in the 1940s, and a global Cold War from the 1950s through the 1980s. During the latter era, nations everywhere sought internal development while the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. competed for global hegemony.

The Depression-era collapse of global industrial capitalism and its leaders in Britain and the United States turned states and entrepreneurs across the Americas inward, but capital was scarce for national projects. The coming of World War II led the U.S. and Britain to seek economic support from Latin American allies like Brazil and Mexico, energizing their economies in the short term, holding out promises of support for development in a postwar era of capitalist freedom. But capital and technology were hard to gain in Latin America during the war. And afterward the U.S. and Britain concluded that the best way to support capitalist freedom in the face of the socialist challenge was to rebuild European allies and subsidize former foes Germany and Japan, while insisting that Latin American allies live—meaning find capital—in open markets. Credits built in Latin Americans’ favor during the war funded brief years of development and some shared prosperity in the late 1940s. The exhaustion of credits made national development radically more expensive in the 1950s, just as Latin Americans faced unimagined population growth.6

Suddenly exploding populations and the rapid expansion of urban centers created needs and costs beyond the capacity of Latin American national projects, just as they faced scarce and expensive capital. As long as the Cold War persisted, and especially after the Cuban Revolution brought its challenge to the Americas, national development projects and promises of shared welfare were kept alive, notably in the credits advanced by the U.S.-promoted Alliance for Progress. Contradictions mounted as debts increased and repeated crises brought stabilizations that imposed the costs on working majorities. Meanwhile, rapidly expanding populations concentrated in burgeoning cities to become ever more disillusioned as employment, education, infrastructure, and effective participation proved scarce. Some turned to radical visions. Regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere turned to military power and authoritarian rule to prevent radical transformations.7 Population explosions and rapid urbanization came with national development crises and political closures.

Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires all grew enormously after 1950; population explosions, economic growth with limited employment, infrastructure challenges, and service...