The challenges of urbanization in Latin America.

• Author: Chelala, Cesar
• Position: PERSPECTIVES

The chaotic growth of today's cities can no longer be ignored. The great challenge is how to improve the quality of urban life by ensuring harmonious growth. Cities can--and should--learn from the experiences of other cities with similar characteristics. This effort requires not only the participation of urban planners but also that of public health and environmental experts, politicians, and fundamentally, the urban communities themselves. Only when these actions are carried out will it be possible, perhaps, to reach that almost ideal situation heralded by Hippocrates some 2,600 years ago: a balance between the human organism and its environment.

Observing the burgeoning growth of the modern city, the more erudite among urban planners may comment wistfully on how different it is from its ancient Greek counterpart, the polis , which Italian architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo once described as "dynamic but stable, in balance with nature, and growing manageably even after reacking large dimensions."

Today's uncontrolled and apparently random urban growth is definitely not what the Greeks had in mind, and it is now a cause for anxiety among public health experts who see a population being robbed of its basic health rights and well-being. In today's largest cities, environmental pollution goes unregulated; green areas are shrinking; housing is inadequate; public services are overburdened; makeshift settlements are mushrooming on the outskirts; and a sense of anomie is growing as increasingly city residents do not know their neighbors.

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The separation of new urbanites from their traditional support networks has led to an increase in crime. It has destroyed the local sense of solidarity and contributed to the fragmentation of what were once cohesive family groups. The distance between home and the workplace has also increased considerably, so workers now find themselves devoting what was once valuable family time to exhausting commutes on overcrowded buses or subways.

In many Latin American cities, old colonial mansions of considerable historic and architectural value are being replaced by huge apartment buildings unrelated to the character of the neighborhood. A new kind of war is being waged in cities throughout the world: esthetics vs. profit.

Movements of people, whether from rural to urban areas or from one country to another, often alter the characteristic epidemiological disease profile. New diseases appear or old ones...