Originally published in 1985, Industrialization and Urbanization in Latin America focuses on the process of industrialisation in Latin America. The book links together the distinctive process of industrialisation to wider issues of urban and regional development in Latin America. The book looks in detail at the process of industrialisation in Latin America and the spatial ramifications in Latin American industrialisation; it argues that industrial growth and its geographical distribution is a principal cause of increasing disparities in income between regions within Latin American countries. This book will appeal to academics working in the field of urbanization and geography.

In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America’s twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken. Latin America’s twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book – Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela – but with references to others. He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why ‘take-off’ was not followed by the ‘drive to maturity’ in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America’s stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called ‘lost decade’ of 1980s. He shows how Latin America’s fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century – especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.

And conclusions. Rapporteur's report -- Conclusions of the seminar -- Selected seminar papers. Demographic aspects of urbanization in Latin America / Population branch, Bureau of Social Affairs, United Nations -- Creation of employment opportunities in relation to labour supply / Secretariat of the Economic Commission for Latin America -- Relationships between economic development, industrialization and the growth of urban population in Brazil / Thomas Pompeu Accioly Borges -- Migration and urbanization : the "barriadas" of Lima, an example of integration into urban life / J. Matos Mar -- Some characteristics of urbanization in the city of Rio de Janeiro / Andrew Pearse -- Inquiry into the social effects of urbanization in a working class sector of greater Buenos Aires / Gino Germani -- Aspects of the adjustment of rural migrants to urban industrial conditions in Saõ Paulo, Brazil / Juarez Rubens Brandão Lopes -- Psychological and mental health problems of urbanization based on case studies in Peru / H. Rotondo -- Problems confronting the city planner and administrator in the town of Esmereldas, Ecuador / Gonzalo Rubio Orbe, Reinaldo Torres Caicedo, Alfredo Costales -- Urbanization and physical planning in Peru / Luis Dorich T. -- Some policy implications of urbanization / Bureau of Social Affairs of the United Nations

This work places in historical and theoretical contexts the work Germani in the area of modernization, especially as it relates to Latin America. Germani views modernization as the touchstone of the twentieth century. His notion of modernization has to do with how a society can harness technology for distinctly political ends and link science to distinctly economic ends.