The Latin American Urban Landscape: A Mosaic of Enhanced Influences

Latin America is a region with great natural and cultural diversity. Since the arrival of the European colonists in 1492 to the present, the subcontinent has been a “sponge” receiving foreign influences from the dominant world economies of each period. Sometimes this process occurred violently replacing pre-existing cultural landscapes, others adapted foreign models to local conditions. The result has been a rich mosaic of urban areas, landscapes, and architectural products that coexist, juxtapose, blur, and evolve into a very distinct, while varied Latin American identity. Understanding this process of adaptation and hybridization of foreign trends may shed light on how to better cope with the assimilation of global influences: a challenge for the emerging contemporary economies in other regions. Particularly notable Latin American products are the large urban design, recreational landscapes, and compelling architectural explorations of the Modernist period produced during the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. But, Latin America is also still considered the region with the greatest social inequality in which very affluent groups coexist with challenged less-affluent communities, while not spatially integrated. Such social fracture manifests itself in differentiated morphologies and living standards between the formal and the informal-or self-constructed-city. Since the 1980’s, there have been compelling efforts dealing with such social disparities, through holistic urban plans for the improvement of these informal settlements and cutting-edge and socially-minded landscapes and architectural explorations, which have also called world attention.