ABSTRACT
The core papers by Alejandro Portes and John Walton in Urban Latin America provide an intensive course in how far theories of urban growth have evolved since an earlier stage dealing with center and periphery only in the geographic terms of factory and residential areas within given cities. The study of economic flows in urban settings, racial and ethnic discrimination patterns, and class composition of interest groups is hardly related to only one area. There is a growing demand for the study of such urban factors as types of accommodation, case of transportation, levels of communication, and forms of entertainment, factors that impose their own international logic on urban growth. Tendencies toward political conservatism of trade unions in Latin America, as in North America, indicate that being urban is not reducible to other variables. Urbanism may itself be an organizing framework of human experience.
