Urbanizing volatility: On Recurrent Crises and the Economic Rhythms of Latin American Urbanization

Debates on global South urbanization have been an important focus of recent urban studies scholarship. Looking at the urban South from the point of view of the Latin American context, this article highlights a missing piece of the economic viewpoint in such debates: the instability that shapes the peripheral economies with which Southern urban dynamics interact. The article argues that this higher level of economic volatility is an important factor in many urban/sociospatial dynamics in Latin America—hence indispensable for an accurate theoretical understanding of the specificities of its cities and urban processes. The applicability of the idea for other regions of the global South is a hypothesis in need of verification and may involve important implications for current urban research. Moreover, I propose that the geographical approaches to precarity may be enhanced with the dimension of economic volatility, which is usually more intense in precarious (urban) contexts.