Montreal in the Twentieth Century

Montreal began the twentieth century as Canada’s primary city, its major port with an emerging industrial sector, ruled by an Anglophone Protestant elite while populated by a Francophone Catholic majority—the two solitudes. Diverse European immigrant communities created a third solitude, producing a city of complex communities. Linguistic and educational segregations drew newcomers to difficult choices. The city juggled its diversity through the depression; World War II and early cold war times brought prosperity. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 ended Montreal’s primacy; Toronto rose to become Canada’s financial and industrial capital—while the Quiet Revolution for Francophone rights in Quebec propelled Montreal to become a more regional cultural capital. That movement helped Montreal protect key industries while immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic world created new ethnic diversity. Urban processes mixing separations, aggregations, and integrations allowed Montreal to grow through urban sprawl and keep solid prosperity, fair distributions, and open opportunities, limiting marginalities.

Boom, Echo, and Splinter

Buenos Aires began the twentieth century as a prosperous port drawing European immigrants to serve a booming export economy. It expanded outward from its core of urban power and prosperity through suburbanization, early on segregating slaughterhouse zones from sites of recreation for the comfortable. Mid-century industrialization drew workers to the peripheries—which became zones of labor politics and bases for active citizenship and Peronist power. Peronist economic and political power sustained an unequally shared prosperity past World War I. Then de-industrialization in times of population expansion accompanied by military dictatorship (1976-1983) and a new suburbanization to protect the wealthy brought the polarizing mix wealth and marginality, formality and informality faced earlier in other New World cities. Re-democratization failed to bring more shared prosperity—or an escape from repeated cycles of promise and crisis.

Generations of Segregation

Los Angeles was built by immigrants from the U.S. South, Asia, and especially Mexico. After 1900 the city grew as a rail terminus, Pacific port, and tourist destination. It became a focus of film making and petroleum production, and developed booming defense industries during World War II and the Cold War. Marketed as the city of dreams, continuing immigration made it increasingly Mexican while Mexicans faced residential segregation that constrained educational chances, economic opportunities, and political participation. Fragmented urban administration allowed Realty Boards and County officials to limit Mexican-American (and African-American) citizenship despite national civil rights policies promoting integration and participation. When defense, energy, and other industries declined in the turn to globalization, African American (1973-93) and Mexican American (2005-13) mayors offered images of opening while enduring segregation constrained education, employment, and life opportunities for Mexican-Americans and African Americans. New immigrants from Mexico, Central America and beyond faced lives of marginality.

Power, Marginality, and Participation in Mexico City, 1870–2000

Traces changing economic ways and political participations in the Mexican capital from the era of late nineteenth liberalism and emerging informalities, into times of revolution after 1910, through the post-revolutionary turn to national capitalism and the construction of an authoritarian regime. With industrial boom after 1940, neither employment or resources proved sufficient to formal development in a rapidly expanding city, leading to barrio-based informal urbanization, as people built their own homes and new neighbourhoods—and turned to neighbourhood mobilizations to make demands and preserve limited gains. With globalization under NAFTA from 1990s, de-industrialization spread marginality while population continued to grow. The democratization of 2000 brought few gains to people facing marginal and informal lives in a city still the national capital, a pivot of power serving globalization, and the largest metropolitan region in the Americas.

Energy Capital and Opportunity City

Houston began the twentieth century as a small cotton port linked to the Gulf of Mexico by a ship channel. It became an important center of oil production and refining before World War II, a leading producer during the war and its aftermath, and the global capital of energy focusing on technological innovation, refining, and petrochemicals as the world economy globalized. As it grew, the city drew migrants, Anglo- and African-American, from the U.S. South, many from Louisiana, to become a diverse but not simply segregated city. The long-term economic benefits of oil-led development allowed unequal yet shared gains and funded the rise of leading medical centers, sustaining a diversified economy after the 1980s oil bust made it a symbol of a major city built on oil. It expanded employment and improved infrastructure, but economic opportunities and physical growth came with high environmental costs, including health challenges and urban problems ranging from water supply, to pollution, to chronic flooding—as the city grew with a new wave of migration from Mexico into the twenty-first century.

The Arc of Formality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro began the twentieth century as capital of a nation that had ended slavery and monarchical rule only in 1888-89. In the new republic, coffee exports and early industrialization concentrated in São Paulo. Rio drew people recently out of slavery and/or escaping the struggling sugar economy of Northeast to irregular subdivisions and informal favelas. As the century moved forward, both the Vargas regime (1930-54, 1950-54) and the military dictatorship (1964-85) promoted formal urban development with land titles and services while the national capital and much of the bureaucracy moved to Brasilia after 1960 and Rio’s limited industrial base corroded. The urban population kept growing, driving a return of informal development as military rule ceded to re-democratization. Favelas, informal subdivisions, and social marginality spread again as criminal enterprises linked to the global drug economy brought limited prosperity and rising violence to the metropolis—contradictions that hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics could not resolve.

The Americas in the Twentieth-Century World

Sets six new world cities—Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Houston—in the context of their nations and a changing global economy. Details how distinct cities faced changing possibilities and limits on production, employment, and resources for urban infrastructure while populations soared everywhere. Concentrations of wealth and power came everywhere, too, while new marginalities led to informal and often illegal economic activities, along with violence that at times led to carceral regimes. Popular mobilizations often brought real gains—yet rarely transformed trajectories toward concentration and often served to stabilize enduring inequities.

Introduction

Engages the intersection of demographic explosion, urbanization, and globalization to offer a new vision of the historic transformation that marked the Americas and the world from the 1950s. Focuses attention on capitalist concentrations of wealth and power, the spread of social marginalization in expanding urban areas, and the persistence and limits of democratic participations. Notes the parallel yet differing experiences of cities across the Americas