The right to the city and multilevel governance in Latin America

This article seeks to show that to realise the right to the city the new urbanisation patterns taking shape in a range of situations require new institutional frameworks and unprecedented government policies. To do this, a time period will be considered that runs from the 1980s to the present when three configurations of events are changing the dynamics of the Latin American city: A process of urbanisation: the end of the countryside to city migration cycle and the beginning of international migration means cities grow less, but with greater complexity. Inequality replaces urban expansion as the main problem, leading to demands for the right to the city (Harvey, 2012; Carrión, 2019) and spatial justice (Secchi, 2015; Soy, 2014). On the other hand, cities cease to operate according to a size-rank mentality with urban hierarchies and begin to act through transurban and interurban dynamics that pose an unprecedented problem: the poor fit between the new forms of urban territory organisation and the institutional structures of government.