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Urbanization in the Caribbean Basin: Social Change during the Years of the Crisis

This article seeks to examine empirically several recent hypotheses on the evolution of Latin American urbanization based on data from five countries in the Caribbean Basin. The hypotheses were advanced by the senior author in an earlier article in this journal (Portes 1989). They concern three major aspects discussed in the literature on Latin American cities: changes in urban primacy, spatial polarization within the largest cities, and the urban informal economy as a countercyclical mechanism. The hypotheses contradict much of the scholarly consensus on the character of Latin American urbanization as summarized in a number of publications (Beyer 1967; Hardoy 1975; Portes and Walton 1976; Roberts 1978; Portes and Johns 1989).