Rio's control room and others

Today's NYT highlights Rio de Janiero's high tech control room. It's the first of its kind in the world to help manage issues from traffic to natural disasters within the giant city.

Obviously, IBM believes this is part of the future of cities and wants every city to have one at some point in the future. The article cites several examples where the system helped the city respond in a more effective manner including the recent building collapse. Given the major events coming up in Rio, it seems like a smart investment for the city.

But should every big city in the region get one of these control rooms? There are questions about how cost-effective these systems are and whether they are really necessary, especially when you consider other programs that could be purchased with the money. Centralizing crisis management at the megalopolis level may be less effective than building small systems at the neighborhood level. It's easy to be wowed by the screens and maps in a control room without really knowing how useful they are.

I think a lot of city managers will be traveling to Rio in the coming five years to see this system and determine whether they need one.

City-state secession

In one of this blog's first posts, I said one possible long-term (100 year) future for the region would be for some countries to split apart with city-states taking a role.

To build on that: What is the first city to secede from its national government in Latin America or the Caribbean?

Here are a few criteria that I think would make it more likely. It would need to be a city that is not the capital or center of national politics. It would probably need to be a city with access to a coastline or at least a border, because being landlocked and surrounded would not be helpful. It would probably also need to be a city that has a different political, economic or social makeup from the capital or the national demographics.

In the context of modern Latin America, there is one city that fits all of those criteria: Guayaquil, Ecuador.  I could easily imagine a narrative that leads to it calling for separation from the national government in Quito in the coming decades.

There are a few other possibilities if you look 50 years out. There are some towns on the Caribbean coast of Central America, particularly in Honduras and Nicaragua, that could hypothetically call for full separation from the national government as they've been generally ignored throughout their history anyway. Rio or Sao Paulo or some cities in Northern Brazil (Recife?) could hypothetically make the attempt, though it's hard to imagine a political future today in which they do. I could also imagine an outlier scenario in which the Yucatan or Baja California areas of Mexico could make that attempt.

None of these scenarios are likely. I don't intend to predict that any of this will occur. However, whatever happens in the next 50 years to the borders of the region, it will be something that is considered an "unlikely" scenario today. Only by looking at the current map and imagining various possible futures can we really think about how Latin America can change 50 or 100 years out.

Reversing urbanization

Latin America is one of the most urbanized regions on the planet, with over 80% of the population living in cities. Several megacities including Rio, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Bogota are well over the five million mark and continue to grow.

Most planners see that trend continuing into the foreseeable future. What would it take for them to be wrong? What sort of crisis, trend or public policy could reverse urbanization in the next 20 or 50 years.

I think the Haiti earthquake shows one very horrific example. Port au Prince was urbanized and overcrowded, but the earthquake created a number of refugees who may never return to the city. That could happen somewhere else, but it's an isolated case that would not create a region-wide trend.

If it economically prospers, Latin America could become suburbanized with people moving just outside of the cities in order to find better housing conditions. A teleworking trend could add to that movement, allowing people freedom to leave urban centers.

On the opposite end, economic decline could cause some cities to decay and could force people to abandon them to find work elsewhere.

In many cases, many of the region's largest cities have old infrastructure that was never intended to support the high populations that exist today. A series of infrastructure failures or government programs to rebuild cities from the underground up could change population patterns.

Continued urbanization isn't a good or a bad thing in itself. It's also not the only possible future for Latin America, even if it's the most likely.