What is progressive city building? Global expertise and local entanglements in Latin America

Abstract

Latin American cities have emerged at the cutting edge of urban planning best practices circulated by multilateral agencies, transnational NGOs, and a cadre of celebrity architects and urbanists. Coherent with–and sometimes prompting–global trends, cities like Buenos Aires and Mexico City have dutifully built bike lanes, pedestrianized streets, and developed new public spaces amidst the frenzied global competition for a vaunted “livable,” “green,” or “sustainable” city. This paper argues that such developments can be understood as constituting a globally dominant progressive urbanism. The defining characteristic of progressive urbanism is an equity priority that lacks meaningful engagement with contentious power relations or the democratization of urban decision making. This paper delineates the scope and influence of these planning and design idioms. In so doing, it signals disjunctions with the historical practices of progressive planning and situates these changes within the broader political economy of contemporary Latin American cities.