It is evident, from reading the various interventions, that we all concur -- that in an age of rapid globalization and informatics -- the North/South construct is fraught with conceptual limitations that fail to capture the current Latin American realities. Nevertheless, certain qualifications are in order.
Globalization is a political economic process that is encased in a larger dynamic: the reconfiguration and expansion of a finance driven economy on a world scale.
This world system is a dynamic, hierarchical, and complex network of power relationships characterized by continuities and discontinuities.
It is within this fluid franework that the range of Latin America's current realities are being reconfigured through a process of economic reinsertion.
Therefore, it is necessary to historicize the different modes of Latin American economic integration and to identify how these modalities impact on the variabilities of specific urban places.

Historicizing the current state(s) of Latin American urbanization necessitates the depriviliging of homogenizing discourses and the identification of economic and cultural differences.

Since the European conquest, economic and cultural hybridity have been constant features in the multiple Latin American landscapes.
There has never existed one Latin American reality -- only hybrid and contingent realities that flow from the historically specific interactions within and between specific social formations and their respective articulations with the world economy.

To accept this optic, is to accept the importance of place as a strategic research site for approximating the micro-geographies of power, subordination, and resistance.
We should, therefore, resist the tendency to collapse the pluralities of the Latin American urban panorama. In this sense, therefore, is it analytically viable to argue that the trajectory of Sao Paulo's urban morphology and social structure are analogous to those of Guatemala City, Santiago, or Santa Fe de Bogota? Although, convergency trends are evident in the built environment and in certain generalized tendencies -- such as increased levels of class polarization and segregated residential patterns -- each and every one of these urban places have their own specific micro-histories which modulate their respective internal structures and their articulation with the world economy.
By over emphasizing convergence and commonalities at the expense of difference and historical specificity the analysis may err on the side of over generalization.

Within this context, it was argued in an earlier intervention that "... whatever the Third World used to mean is now a more generalized condition (the difference is now a question of scale rather than type)."

This line of argumentation obviates the range of differences in the Latin American urban experience and highlights the commonalities between the center ("developed countries") and the margins ("developing countries").
This homogenization and collapsing of difference ignors the centrality of such fundamental issues of power, geo-political stratification, internal socio-economic differentiation, the importance of place, and the variability of micro-histories. Moreover, by privileging and historicizing the specificity of distinct places differences are brought to the foreground. Methodologically this would allow to specify how the new information technologies are being inserted within specific urban places. This would then facilitate an analysis that goes beyond such a generalized category as the mega-city construct that tends to submerge how the informatics technolgies are concretized differently in specific places.

The imacts of globalization are an undeniable fact in Latin America. This is, nevertheless, an embedded, uneven, and variable process.
Moreover, the globalization construct is a difficult concept to empirically operationalize at the level of specific places.
To engage in such an effort would require a high degree of historical specificity. Historical variability is also evident, within individual countries, in their different rates and types of foreign investment, levels of state deregualtion, and in their distinct institutional arrangements accomidating the newly discovered panacea of privatization.
These inter-related processes have a range of discernable impacts on the configuration and role of the state, internal political processes, and urban structures. For example, in certain countries, as the state is restructured and decentralized to meet the logic of the market, new political practices at the local and popular levels are gradually emerging. This is evident in the rise of social movements which tend to be highly specific and particularized. They represent a significant shift from the overarching political vernacular of mass mobilization which was formally associated with a centralized and interventionist state. In many instances, the political langauge of the new social movements are rooted in the structures of every-day-life -- housing, potable water, transportation, etc. Conversely, under differing circumstances, the political language of certain social movements combine difference and specificity with more encompassing categories.

Examples of this phenomena are the movements for Black consciousness, indigenous and ethnic rights, feminism, children's rights, and ecological sustainability. In order to grasp the significance and variability of these emerging social movements on specific places and the new modalities of governance, it is necessary to formulate novel forms of theorization and to engage in detailed historical analysis.

To approximate the multiple Latin American realities -- under the current process of globalization -- the heterogeneity of the continent's realities should be the site of analytical departure. In this regard, posotion and gaze are important issues. Many mainstream analysts tend to conceptualize the globalization of the Latin American region(s) as a uni-linera movement emanating from the center to the margins. Such linearity factors out the dynamic feedback loops between the local and global levels. A more viable approach, in our reading, would be to invert the unit of analysis. By initiating the analysis at the local level and identifying and historicizing the connections and discontinuities with the global level, the multiple specificities of the Latin American realities would not be subsumed under abstract and a-historical theoretical constructs.

Reconceptualizing the impacts of globalization in Latin America through these inverted lenses would provide us with a fundamentally different optic. It would expand our analytical scope. For example, in the case of Latin American luxery highrise housing, its development and place specific characteristics could then be analyzed in a more nuanced and dialectical manner. We could move beyond a uni-linear mode of analysis which views the significance of this built form as primarily an example of cultural and ideological diffusion. Yes, undeniably this is part of the story. But, it is not the whole story. In this sense, if one were to study the case of Santa Fe de Bogota, it would be evident that the increasingly popularity of highrise luxury apartment complexes are specific responses to local realities; the recycling and laundering of narco-monies into this sector, changing urban land rents, and the shift by high-income sectors from low density housing to highrise apartments -- as a result of increased levels of crime and generalized insecurity.
These dynamics are linked to the specific contours of the Colombian political economy. Nevertheless, they are also indicative of wider linkages with the global economy. Skewed income patterns, artificial valorizations in urban land markets, social decomposition, increased levels in street crimes, and narco-trafficking are socio-economic dynamics that can not be analytically severed from the larger process of globalization. Within the Colombian context, these dynamics are embedded with a particularized form of peripheral capitalism.

In our reading, it is evident that the local and the global are not discrete categories. They must be analyzed in tandem as dialectical processes that emerge and re-emerge in reworked and in historicaly specific configurations and places. In order to approximate these contingent realities it is necessary to excavate and articulate the many and varied micro-histories that make up the Latin American realities. This requires a reworking of conceptual categories and an engagement with historical analysis that would ground abstract theorization with the varied realities of the Latin American continent.

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