Otto Verkoren

Polycentric Structures in Latin American Metropolitan Areas : Identifying Employment Sub-centres

Fernández-Maldonado A. M., Romein A., Verkoren O. and Parente Paula Pessoa R. Polycentric structures in Latin American metropolitan areas: identifying employment sub-centres, Regional Studies. The significant spatial transformations that have occurred within Latin American metropolitan areas since the 1990s have triggered many local studies claiming the formation of polycentric structures. This study explores the extent of that process, identifying sub-centres of employment using the double threshold methodology of job concentration and employment density in Mexico City (Mexico), Lima (Peru) and Fortaleza (Brazil). The results, although partial due to an absence of data on informal employment, indicate that Latin American metropolises are moving towards polycentric structures. But the identified employment sub-centres are mostly located in or near the metropolitan core, which practically excludes the formation of polycentric nodes in the metropolitan periphery.

Local Governance and Local Development in Latin America: Views from Above and Below

Looking at Latin America in the twenty-first century, the subcontinent appears to have reinvented itself. Economies have been transformed under liberalization and globalisation, political environments have been modified by democratic transitions, and many social and cultural changes have brought about clear-cut modernization processes, with consequences such as, for example, the remodelling of the ‘traditional role’-spatial pattern with its primate cities and weak peripheries. Undeniably, during the second half of the twentieth century, the manifold processes of decentralized development have had an impressive impact on Latin America’s political, economic, social and spatial landscapes.