The com-fused city: land market and the production or urban infrastructure in great Latin-American cities

Abstract

With the crisis of urban Fordism, the real estate market has reemerged as a determining force in the social coordination process of land use and in the production of intra-urban structure. It has been the return of the Í€œinvisible handÍ€ of the market. This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between the production of urban structure and the functioning modes of formal and informal land markets in Latin America. It proposes the hypothesis that, compared to the two traditional models (compact Mediterranean cities and the Anglo-Saxon diffused cities), Latin American cities exhibit a particular urban structure. In these cities, the functioning of land markets produces simultaneously a compact and a diffused urban structure. This urban structure, characteristic of large Latin American cities, we designate as the Í€œCom-FusedÍ€ City.

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