The wave of urban development experienced in Latin America during the 1980's was driven by the global economy.
In
Buenos Aires, Bogota and other cities, a questionable preservation of historic
buildings was achieved only in those cases where the shell of the building
could impart local color or a higher status to the new program. There have been few instances where local designers were hired to implement
projects and even fewer where they were able to successfully transform the
imported model to prevent it from destroying local urban quality. I think that Christine Boyer is right in pointing out the inadequacy of 1970's
categories such as center/periphery and North/South in the analysis of urban
development and cultural production in Latin America, because economic
globalization creates "centers" and "peripheries" that are now globally
distributed.
Camilo Jos~ Vergara's photographic documentation of so-called
"Third World" enclaves in cities like New York, Chicago , Detroit and Los
Angeles makes a forceful case for this argument.
Electronic technologies, as both Tom Angotti and Saskia Sassen point out, have
fostered economic globalization and the globalization of local elites in Latin
American countries.
The question, as always, will be one of access and
control. Can the technology itself generate American suburban-style dispersion
in Latin American countries? This is doubtful in the short run, given the great
economic polarization and wide-spread poverty in the region. More likely, the
technological facilitation of global capital might produce further development
opportunities in interior locations not currently under the influence of the
large urban centers, and in time result in a pattern closer in structure and
form to American and European metropolitan centers.
The capital cities of many countries
experienced considerable transformation of their historical centers and their
urban fabric as a result of new construction originating in international
investments on buildings for the banking industry, tourism and shopping.
These new
developments, which imitated styles, building typologies and spatial
configurations originated in the US, have marked the center of Latin American
cities, as well as other coastal or mountainous tourist destinations, as
locations within the homogenizing web of global economic processes.
One such
example is a major shopping mall in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, whose
architects succeeded in getting the city to reject the American suburban
pattern of "big box" retail surrounded by parking, and created a building with
parking on its roof that is well integrated with its surroundings and has small
stores opening into the commercial street. This intelligent and successful act
of cultural resistance, however, has not enjoyed wide dissemination and thus
has not been more widely influential.
One characteristic of the Internet , however, is its lack
of physical location and thus its ability, as a site for the production and
exchange of information, to connect locally disadvantaged individuals and
groups with similar individuals and groups world-wide, thus exponentially
increasing the opportunities for global strategies for cultural and (perhaps)
economic resistance.
