ABSTRACT
The environment of Latin America, that is, its natural biophysical resource context and successive artificial transformations of that context, its spatial outlay, has been one of the fundamental conditioning elements of the region's historical development. Manufacturing industry, which had developed in the larger and richer Latin American countries, consisted mainly of small- and medium-sized textile, footwear, food processing, soap, and furniture factories and other light industries. In the construction industry, designs, materials, and know-how displaced the existing building industry, even the traditional customs, local materials, and skills which most of the population used to build their own dwellings. The most dramatic urban problems in Latin America are undoubtedly massive poverty, underemployment, and the precarious housing conditions that characterize a large, and in many cases growing, proportion of the urban population. The emphasis in development strategies shifted to the reproduction locally of the production patterns of the industrial countries—those production patterns that were the basis of lifestyle of the industrial societies.
