Once a source of economic dynamism, megacities risk becoming a drag on growth

This is a very real problem. The traffic levels in places like Sao Paulo have to be seen to be believed. It is utter chaos. All friends/family of mine who work in this city spend considerable amounts of time simply sat in their car. When I am in Brazil I frequently see people reading papers/ magazines whilst driving.. occasionally looking at the road. It is a reality which is only getting worse. People arrive at work already exhausted. The situation limits their spare time - and therefore their ability to innovate.

Cities like Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Calcutta, New Delhi, Cairo, and their likes, should be forbidden to grow for at least 20 years in order to give a breathing space for their public transport systems to catch up.

The smart city planners in Brazil ruled out trams and trolleybuses,
having decided that cars are a much more intelligent solution to transportation problems in big cities.

In the meanwhile their stupid European counterparts invested heavily in public transportation. That is why cities like São Paulo are so much more livable than Viena, Zurich and Berlin.

You say lack of planning, I say FREEDOM. Why do you hate the free market, Economist?

Fabio, the population of metropolitan area of Buenos Aires is generally considered to be 13 - 14 million people (http://www.censo2010.indec.gov.ar/preliminares/cuadro_totalpais.asp).

I think the comment about Latin American megacities being more dangerous than cities in developed countries misses the point: Latin American megacities are more dangerous than large cities in developing countries as well, at least from a visitor's perspective. Rio, Sao Paulo and Mexico City are more dangerous than Bangkok, Delhi or Shanghai - or Buenos Aires, for that matter.

@mzM, Buenos Aires is a "town" of 3 million people. Hardly a megacity.

Sorry.

In brilliant irony for the timing of this article, Jaime Lerner the Father of Curitiba's lauded transit livability was condemned to 3.5 years prison today. The bureaucracy did not appreciate his pace of reform

Good stuff and analysis. Of course it is skewed. But there is no denying that at least in Central America where we live urban planning is NOT a priority on anyones list. It is a all for themselves mad rush of beautiful chaos. It has its pros and cons for sure. I HOPE a city like San Salvador never becomes like Los Angeles. I hate Los Angeles.

Good and truthful article. Being from Tijuana, Mexico, the fifth largest city in the country (larger tan Merida and growing faster than Monterrey), I can see the new strategic implications that these new growing cities enyoy: Good geograpical locations, booming population and thus cheap labor, etc... But also, lack of infraestructure is a problem, if Latin American goverments don't adress the needs of better roads, ports and other infraestructure, then these cities will stop producing wealth and will become cramped shanty towns that just generate violence and organized crime (thus, fueling imformal economies).

It draw my attention that the author of this articule did not mention a single figure or reference to Buenos Aires city. It rounds a little biased or misinformed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4RhNvjk4YI

andrew7940
"This problem is not unique to developing countries."
True. But the case of 401, the busiest in NA cannot be a basket case. It is also to do with some of its design flaws.
By far, Canadian traffic is above par to the daily nuisances of the developing world cities.

I mean Chicago, New York, traffic gets clogged in peak hours, but nothing like the dangerous third world cities.

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/new-york-has-worst-traffic-in...

Some, of the pains and environmental impact can be lessened by efficient public transit, what at what cost?

Think about the TTC Sheppard Subway extension (LRT or subway), whose going to pay for it -- privat-public partnership?

BTW, TTC and her relatively clean stations are like a dream, compared to the present US city where going to downtown is a nightmare.

This problem is not unique to developing countries. Toronto has some of the worst traffic congestion in North America, and in particular Highway 401 (the main east west freeway in the city) is notorious. Despite being up to 18 lanes wide in sections, and divided in to "express" and "collector" lanes, it is always congested, often even in the middle of the day and on weekends. Public transit is severely inadequate in most parts of the city, is treated as a political football, and the pace of expansion is very slow. Also it doesn't help that many employers build their offices in the middle of nowhere in distant suburbs of the city where employees are basically forced to drive to work.

A few counterfactuals to point out. A number of issues in the country now said to be a drag on the growth of the city are precisely because of the growth leading up to this point. São Paulo, Rio, Mexico City, Lima, etc. are messes because the level of economic opportunity there does not compare to the rest of the country. The HDI of both Mexico City (DF proper) and São Paulo (0.905 and 0.841, respectively, although the numbers are both about a decade old), both within the UN's bands for "high-income". Compare that to the rural Northeast of Brazil or the indigenous parts of the south of Mexico. The crime rate has plummeted in São Paulo to the extent that it is often compared (in this magazine, among other places) to NYC in the 1990s, and Mexico City has been largely spared the civil war tearing apart other parts of the country, as well as it is having significant success taming the kidnapping epidemic of the last two decades. São Paulo's problematic traffic is because the Brazilian middle class, particularly within the city, has exploded at such high rates, while not "enjoying" the benefits of a more centrally planned economy (e.g., Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo). Santiago and Mexico City's notorious pollution has peaked and is declining at a respectable pace. The potential tax base in these cities are huge, there just is an inevitable lag between the growth that has just happened and the local government's capacity to deal with it. Brazil's three-month-long (I believe) tax holiday on car purchases at the end of 2009 did it no favours, however.

@Mr Ripley.

Fortunately that is finally going to be resolved, slowly. The housing dept in São Paulo have a R$1bn a year programme for the integration and development of the cities favelas, there are large scale public transport project on that are being rolled out plus the high-speed link will connect the centre with Guarulhos massively increasing public transport links and volume of rolling stock between the centre and periphery. Still, this will take a long time.

@Guy, you are correct. What I saw was the population of the city itself and not the metropolitan region, which, in this article, should count. The metropolitan region of Buenos Aires is a megacity after all. As for this article, this is just another piece of non-sense produced by this journal.

Just when Britain is trying to understand the source, meaning and implications of the rioting in London and other major British cities at the eve of the Olympic Games, this journal comes to debate the problems of Latin American cities. Clever eh!?

The truth of the matter is that the world is becoming more and more urbanised with very different people, leading very different lives, living very close, almost on top of each other. London, for one, is clearly overcrowded. Throughout the world people are leaving the countryside in search of more and better opportunities in the cities. As this people come to the city and have to start their lives from scratch and with many failures, cities go through a process of degradation or “favelisacao” where people develop all the vices they are capable off, very close to each other.

And I don’t see the end of it.

City planning is challenging worldwide, balancing scarce resources against the need to improve citizens opportunities and lives. Smart mayors and city councilors around the globe are beginning to share ideas and information based on traveling elsewhere, internet forums and civic groups.

One idea I would love to see the Economist sponsor is a contest for the best Urban Planning computer game which is built with multi-language capability in mind. Then the game could be unleashed on citizens everywhere who would see the constraints and tradeoffs in urban planning faced by politicians and bureaucrats but be able to contribute innovative ideas to the mix.

The same problem is happening in Mexico, not only in Mexico City and Monterrey, but also in the other 9 cities with over 1 million people. The governments have bet on urban development based on the American suburban model, where most of the new houses are located far from the city centers, with low densities and without nearby services. This had led people to drive around to do even the simplest things, from taking their children to school to going to their jobs and even buying their groceries.

The problem is not "productivity" rather "re-productivity." When are things going to get so bad that we start to impose limits upon all this uncontrolled breeding? By almost any objective measure, human beings are far in surplus all over the world. We can solve the problem ourselves (in varying degrees of coercion and/or incentive) or Nature will solve it for us, most unpleasantly.

I like these reports from McKinsey but this one clearly miss the whole point. For instance, direct comparisons between Santiago and São Paulo even if they are included in different clusters (see the pdf at McKinsey´s) only serves to biasing and leading to wrong conclusions. And as for the self appointed European and also Asian paradigms at the end of the article, please give us a break.

@jfcarli,

It is unfair to blame only "smart" city planners for the chaos of Brazilian cities. The planners, no matter how much forward-thinking, were always overruled by big money interests, particularly the real-estate moguls and the car lobby.

São Paulo, for instance, has had designs for a subway network since before World War II, but only started to actually build it in the 70s (and has gone ahead with much needed expansion at a snail's pace).

As with most public policy issues in Brazil, the real problem has always been our oligarchical, undemocratic political system. Civic-minded planners and social activists never had the political clout needed to face powerful private interests entrenched in the city government.

Democracy is really very young in Brazil, and such things are only now beginning to change.