Ciudad y violencias en América Latina

THIS BOOK IS the outcome of a seminar organized jointly by the municipality of Cali, Colombia, and Programa de Gestión Urbana in Cali at the end of 1993. It is divided into five sections, with 17 chapters including two essays by the mayors of Cali and the city of Córdoba, Argentina. Following an introduction by one of the editors, the second section contains papers on the wider determinants and main features of urban violence, with illustrations from Latin America and Colombia as well as the legal dimensions of the problem. These papers clearly point towards a move away from perceiving violence as a pathological/psychological problem to stressing instead the social and political roots of a growing problem. The short papers by the two mayors in the third section of the book discuss the approaches taken by two city governments, in dealing with urban violence. The fourth section presents detailed studies of eight Latin American cities: Cali, Guayaquil (Ecuador), Lima (Peru), Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), San Salvador (El Salvador) and Santiago (Chile). The book concludes with a communiqué from the seminar participants and a specialized bibliography mostly in Spanish and English.