ABSTRACT
There is a growing understanding that models of urban development that have emerged from study of cities in Europe and North America have been applied to cities in ‘developing countries’ in a manner that ensures that those cities are always judged as ‘backwards’. Such accounts have, of course, tended to ignore the specific development trajectories and internal differentiation of urban territories and societies in Latin America (Panadero, 2001). For example, Table 13.1 highlights general trends where pre-industrial architecture and symbolic values of quarters inherited from medieval, renaissance, baroque and classicism found in Islington, London, and Le Marais, Paris, have been restored through gentrification of housing
from multiple-occupancy to family homes. In contrast, however, large cities in North and Latin American cities can be characterized through the emergence of high-rise buildings and suburban development (White, 1984; Yarwood, 1974). However, in many US cities such urban change has gone hand in hand with gentrification of nineteenth-century quarters with old industrial buildings being converted into home-studios, for example the loft living associated with Soho, New York. Similarly, in cities in Latin American a mixed heritage of both European and US style urban areas can be found in the inner cities. However, the eclectic mix of European architecture and a post-Hispanic gridded urban fabric characterized by local materials adobe, wood and brick has been observed as now existing next to the high-rise glass and steel buildings of international companies and gated communities in the last decade.
