Latin American Urban Studies

Latin American urban studies examines how rapid urbanization, housing markets, and globalization have reshaped the social and spatial organization of cities across the region, with particular attention to who gets to live where and under what conditions. Researchers trace the forces behind residential segregation—gated communities expanding on city edges, informal settlements persisting in urban cores—and ask how these patterns reproduce or entrench broader social inequalities across metropolitan areas. Active debates center on whether housing policies and urban planning interventions actually reduce socio-spatial fragmentation or inadvertently deepen it, and on how global capital flows interact with local governance to shape land use in ways that benefit some residents while displacing others.

Works

116,777

Total citations

98,746

Keywords

SegregationResidentialUrbanizationLatin AmericaSocial InequalityMetropolitan Areas