Suchergebnisse

This paper explores the importance of patterns of urbanization and migration in Colombia for the design of appropriate policies for regional, urban, and intermediate-city development. An opening section reviews the growth of the nineteen major municipios over the period 1918 through 1964, the date of the most recent available census. When these cities are ranked by size from largest to smallest, one observes a high degree of stability of rankings over the fifty-year period considered. This stability supports the hypothesis that an articulated hierarchy and system of cities has developed. That development in turn owes much to the flow of migrants into these cities. Largely as a result of the intensive migration into the four largest cities, their share of the total population of the 19 urban municipios rose from 46 percent in 1918 to 62 percent by 1964.

In 1968, I was offered the opportunity to prepare a brief survey of resources and prospects for quantitative research in Latin American History by the ad hoc Committee on Quantitative Data of the American Historical Association. I was at first charged with treatment of the whole period 1500-1960, but the willingness of John TePaske to undertake a lion's share of the task ended in limiting my responsibility to 'only' the 19th and 20th centuries. The results of that survey, as indeed those of Professor TePaske's work, are available in the collection of papers edited by Val R. Lorwin and Jacob Price, The Dimensions of the Past. In the notes which follow I will try to avoid repeating any of the presentation in that work and will instead try to build a bridge between that effort of five years ago and developments in this field of research in the past few years.