ABSTRACT
The world-system perspective and urban political economy enabled urban scholars in the 1970s to adopt a global approach to study urban development, but an analytical framework that could guide comparative urban analyses still was missing. It is always tempting to begin discussions of a topic as broad as urbanization and development by lamenting the lack of progress in the field or denigrating other researchers for their narrow range of geographical and substantive interest and adherence to outmoded theories. The urban tertiary sector expands in numbers while economic opportunity is progressively fragmented in a process of “urban involution.” The implication to be drawn from our framework, of course, is that urbanization levels and urban problems are greater in Latin America. The principal beneficiaries are the large landowners and comprador classes involved in commerce and export who, in turn, consume imports and luxury goods and invest in urban properties. The urban hinterland assumes a hierarchal structure governed by extractive purposes.
