Six countries and twenty years

This chapter puts forward “an implied look and a transversal reading” across six countries of the subcontinent, which amass a third of the Latin American population. The central issues include the contradiction between housing policy and urban policy, the unchecked power of real estate developers, the fragility of the achievements of the Habitat agenda, and legal achievements that lack sufficient implementation. It also includes reflections on the acute weaknesses of the broad decentralization trend in Latin America, the growing inequality in the region, and the relative irrelevance of United Nations Habitat declarations. The New Urban Agenda must undertake a series of institutional arrangements and redesigns with a local and community emphasis to ensure that it will not replicate sectorial structures and that it embraces complexity, coordinated actions, and the harmonization of nested – and often conflicting – governmental levels.