Abstract

Recent news about a predominantly urban world and the need for a new urban agenda were not a surprise in Latin America and the Caribbean, where populations have been concentrated in urban settlements since 1961. As populations expanded, this early urbanization led to the unification of neighboring jurisdictions, generating the phenomenon of metropolization. Most people in the Latin America and Caribbean region currently live in metropolitan areas. This process has triggered the passage of new national laws for cities and regions; as a result, new planning systems have been implemented in most Latin American and Caribbean countries. This chapter reviews the current laws and plans of prominent cities in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela, where local and subnational governments, as well as citizens, are forced to play different roles in new regimes of national transformative utopias and dystopias. In this context, although there are plenty of traditional rational/comprehensive plans, civil society organizations are pushing their way into the decision-making stages in order to change the status quo and promote deliberative/procedural-based plans. Finally, the chapter concludes with a summary of possible future urban and regional planning strategies within the framework of governance.