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INTRODUCTION
Capitalist urbanization is widely recognized as a central concern in the global environmental changes of the early twenty-first century (Grimm et al., 2008; UN-HABITAT, 2008). This reflects growing recognition of the extent to which urban systems act as centers of capital accumulation and political power that influence unsustainable material and energy flows over a larger area than the 3 percent of the planet’s terrestrial surface officially classified as urban, and of the rapid urbanization of the human population over the past few centuries as a unique process in human history (Harvey, 1996; Decker, Elliott, Smith, Blake, & Rowland, 2000).
Latin America has figured prominently in the urbanization of the Global South since the 1950s. The urban population of Latin America and the Caribbean comprises only 13 percent of the world’s total urban population, but the region is the most heavily urbanized (more than 80 percent of the population) of the Global South and second overall only to North America (UNDESA, 2015). Rates of urbanization within the region are highly heterogeneous, but all its cities tend to exhibit extreme spatial segregation associated with Latin America’s polarized wealth and income (Cohen, 2004). The spread of North American models of urban sprawl throughout the region since the 1990s has increased this spatial segregation at local scales and encouraged the growth of gated developments (Caldeira, 1996; Janoschka, 2002). Despite the rapid growth of Latin America’s megaciudades, the majority of the urban population dwells in the region’s numerous midsize cities, where most future growth is anticipated (Cohen, 2004). This trend is already evident in Mexico, where in 2010 the largest proportion of the country’s population—approximately 30 million people, or 37 percent—was situated in the country’s more than 130 midsize cities (that is, cities with total populations between 100,000 and 1 million) (CONAPO-SEDESOL-SEGOB, 2012).
These quantitative trends reflect the qualitative aspects what of Marx & Engels (2010, p. 64) described as a “contradiction between town and country” that characterizes urbanization under capital’s “ultimately uncontrollable mode of social metabolic control” (Mészáros, 1995, p. 41, emphasis in original). This contradiction figures prominently in Marx’s theory of metabolic rift1 (Foster, 2000), as some of his most direct references to the theory in Capital are in his discussion of...