The world became urban in the twentieth century. Across the Americas, growing majorities concentrated in metropolitan centers; economic and political power and possibilities focused there, as did educational chances, medical services, and cultural opportunities. Most of the world followed a parallel path, sharing in an urbanization driven in large part by the global population explosion that accelerated after 1950. Together, demographic acceleration and urbanization fueled the widening economic, social, and cultural interactions called globalization by century’s end. Yet these historically transcendent transformations have barely begun to impact thinking about con temporary history. The first question is why. The more important...

Rapid urbanization reshaped lives across the Americas and the world during the second half of the twentieth century—a transformation at the heart of the accelerating transnational integration we call globalization. Cities everywhere faced trying challenges: soaring population growth, limited economic possibilities, difficulty providing employment, infrastructure, and services to burgeoning numbers—and the pressures of popular groups demanding better. The voices promoting globalization in the 1990s promised economic growth and shared prosperity. Growth has proven uneven, prosperity rarely shared. As the dream became realities shaped by concentrating wealth, uncertain popular gains, and widening insecurities, new challenges have arisen—often political,...

Mexico City had lived six centuries of complex history, indigenous, imperial, and national, when it faced the population explosion that brought unprecedented challenges after 1950. It had been capital of a Mesoamerican empire, pivot of global silver capitalism, center of a liberal national project, then leader of an experiment in national capitalism. The city was home to more than 200,000 people before Europeans came in 1519. They delivered diseases that cut the urban population—while carrying visions of profit that led the city to rise again as Spain’s North American capital, the financial and commercial center of a silver economy...

Rio de Janeiro has always been ahead of the curve, although not always in the best ways. Rio has led the developing world through several traumatic urban transitions. The contrast between stately public buildings in cosmopolitan business districts and sprawling, un-serviced slums nearby became unmistakably evident in Rio earlier than it did in places like São Paulo and Buenos Aires, for example, where self-built housing for the poor was for the most part pushed farther to the periphery. Rio’s political powers experimented both with localized eviction and then large-scale favela removal projects a generation ahead of their peers in places...

For more than a century, the city and suburbs of Buenos Aires have contained a third of the population of Argentina, an extraordinary level of dominance even for a region where urban primacy is the rule. At the outset of the city’s growth, the expansion of its metropolitan area became closely linked with the expansion of citizenship—understood as increasing political participation, social rights, and access to public goods. Yet over the course of the century, the urban periphery has gone from a crucible for transforming national politics to a space of division and abandonment. This chapter will explore why...

The history of Montreal in the twentieth century has been defined by multiple, quite unique tensions. It can only be understood by considering interlocking local/regional, national, and international developments. The leading metropolis of a country undergoing rapid growth at the end of the nineteenth century, Montreal found itself one century later in a period of redevelopment and redefinition. Long the engine of the Canadian economy, it was the place where wealth, power—and poverty—concentrated. Now a regional metropolis, the city evolves at the intersection of its role as Quebec’s primary metropolis and as the center of diverse networks linking...

A mimeographed sheet containing these words was handed to Julius Blue, an African American World War II veteran, and his wife when they inquired about purchasing a home in Allied Gardens, a new development of 392 single family homes in Van Nuys, California, in August 1948. The couple had been drawn to the San Fernando Valley by an advertisement offering “wonderful terms” to G.I.s, giving them hope of improving their housing circumstances by moving from the central city to another part of the city of Los Angeles. The sheet, while reflecting long-standing housing practices by realtors and sellers in Southern...

This chapter focuses on Houston, Texas, the last of our six New World cities to become a major metropolis—and among them, the city with the most dynamic twentieth-century economy. Houston’s global leadership in the production, transportation, processing, and consumption of oil and natural gas has propelled its long-term, sustained economic success. For more than one hundred years this region has adapted to the cycles of booms and busts in the world petroleum industry. While adjusting to its changing role in the world economy, the Houston region has expanded from the center of the emerging oil center of Texas and...

“The global scale and impact of urban settlements and cities will determine the course of the emergent twenty-first century.” So predicted experts from the Population Institute in Washington, D.C., in a 1999 paper.¹ By 2030, almost 5 billion people will live in cities, with the pace of urbanization especially accelerating in the developing world.² Dramatic pro cesses of urbanization and unpre ce dented challenges of city life became global phenomena in the twentieth century, and they will continue to shape the future. Fathoming the twentieth century without placing cities at the center (or near the center) is a historical distortion....