ABSTRACT
Throughout the region, historically there has been a distinct lack of long-term planning in regard to the economies of Latin America. This in turn has resulted in a lack of urban planning and the subsequent uneven concentrations of rapidly-growing urban populations that have led to the current generation of megacities. These megacities act increasingly as concentrators and accumulators of the wealth of the country as a whole, dominating the national hinterland – centralization and concentration of economic and state power is a serious problem throughout Latin America and can be see in its extremes in city-regions such as Gran Caracas in Venezuela. This process of metropolitan concentration, derived to a great extent from the urban reflection of colonial and post-colonial power structures, has restricted the development of most of these cities, which might otherwise be more fully connected to global city networks – such megacities are increasingly hyper-conurbations of a differentially internally integrated character.
