Accommodating Growth in Latin American and Caribbean Cities - A Land and Housing Pathway for Managing Informality

Urban expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is inevitable. More than 80 percent of the region’s population already lives in urban areas, yet cities continue to absorb substantial additional growth. Between the 1990s and the 2020s, metropolitan areas such as São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City expanded by approximately 59 percent, 44 percent, and 36 percent respectively, together adding nearly 18 million urban residents. Looking ahead, LAC is projected to add around 146 million additional urban residents between 2020 and 2050, placing increasing pressure on housing systems, land markets, and infrastructure. In many cities, growth is occurring without sufficient well-located, serviced, and legally developable land for affordable housing. When formal land and housing systems fail to keep pace with demand, households turn to informal subdivision and incremental self-construction. Informality thus emerges not as an isolated policy failure, but as a predictable outcome of urban growth that is not anticipated or spatially planned for. Addressing informality therefore requires more than upgrading existing settlements; while upgrading remains essential, it cannot keep pace if new informal settlements continue to form faster than they can be improved. This event presents and discusses the key findings from Accommodating Growth in LAC Cities by IDB–NYU–KRIHS (http://dx.doi.org/10.18235/0013550), which draws on empirical evidence from 70 cities, including a detailed analysis of urban expansion patterns across 68 cities in the LAC region. Through comparative analysis and concrete cases, including Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Chile, the session highlights how proactive land preparation, infrastructure sequencing, and strengthened metropolitan governance can support more orderly urban expansion and improve housing outcomes as cities grow. By translating growth patterns into actionable land, housing, and infrastructure strategies, the event demonstrates how data-driven territorial planning can help governments better anticipate urban expansion, expand access to affordable housing and serviced land, and support a transition toward more compact, connected, inclusive, and resilient metropolitan development. Ultimately, the session advances a clear proposition: because urban growth is unavoidable, cities must move from reacting to informality toward planning for growth, so that expansion becomes a driver of inclusion and long-term urban sustainability.