A Prolegomenon to Latin American Urban History
Ma /[ UCH OF THE CONTEMPORARY interest in the urban history of Third World countries attaches to the role of cities as agents, or as arenas, for the transition to industrial societies. Usually, this evolution involves transactions and accommodations between a non-Western civilization and certain ideological and organizational imperatives of Western origin. The Latin American case is different, for here European conquest terminated or violently redirected the development of Amerindian societies. The new societies of the sixteenth century were at once "colonial" and Western. The drama occurring in contemporary Latin America is therefore an encounter between two fragments, or successive moments, of Western experience. Oddly enough, this encounter is yielding an outcome less conclusively "modern" than that produced by the impingement of Western capitalism and technology on the alien cultural and feudal institutions of Japan. Until recently, the "development" mania has focused analysis of Third World urban societies on the supersession of archaic or traditional features as they enter the era of the industrializing, mass-based polity. More cursory attention is paid to the preservation and reworking of preindustrial features. Typical of this propensity is Gideon Sjoberg's widely read The Preindustrial City, which dichotomizes the world's cities by two primary categories, preindustrial and industrial.' Though claiming, unconvincingly, to avoid determinism, Sjoberg isolates industrial technology as a key variable that conditions social structure, allocation of political power, criteria for social mobility, division of labor, standardization of means of exchange, and man's relation to nature. By his reckoning all the world's cities before the nineteenth century as well as contemporary cities in parts of Asia, Africa, southern