In 2024, approximately 22.81 million people lived in the São Paulo metropolitan area, making it the biggest in Latin America and the Caribbean and the fifth most populated in the world. The homonymous state of São Paulo was also the most populous federal entity in the country. The second place for the region was Mexico City with 22.51 million inhabitants.

Brazil's cities

Brazil is home to two large metropolises, only counting the population within the city limits, São Paulo had approximately 12.4 million inhabitants, and Rio de Janeiro around 6.8 million inhabitants. It also contains a number of smaller, but well known cities such as Brasília, Salvador, Belo Horizonte and many others, which report between 2 and 3 million inhabitants each. As a result, the country's population is primarily urban, with nearly 85 percent of inhabitants living in cities.

Mexico City

Mexico City's metropolitan area ranks fifth in the ranking of most populated cities in the world. Founded over the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in 1521 after the Spanish conquest as the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the city still stands as one of the most important in Latin America. Nevertheless, the preeminent economic, political, and cultural position of Mexico City has not prevented the metropolis from suffering the problems affecting the rest of the country, namely, inequality and violence. Only in 2021, the city registered a crime incidence of 45,336 reported cases for every 100,000 inhabitants and around 32 percent of the population lived under the poverty line.

As of 2024, three out of ten Latin American and Caribbean cities with the highest local purchasing power were located in Mexico. With an index score of 51.3, people in Querétaro had the highest domestic purchasing power in Mexico. In South America, the city with the highest domestic purchasing power for 2024 was Montevideo, scoring 53 index points.

This dataset supplements the scientific article by Pierri-Daunt and Siedentop (2025), which introduces a classification system for 18 cities in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), encompassing a total of 253 municipalities. It provides the dataset used for the classification, along with the cluster numbers assigned to each group. The dataset combines various socioeconomic, demographic, and spatial characteristics of built-up areas at two scales of analysis: the city–regional scale (Data.city.origin.3HC.csv) and the municipal scale (Data.munic.orig.3HC.csv). Its purpose is to classify, compare, and identify cities and municipalities with similar typological features. A complete description of the methodology and data sources can be found in README.txt and dataset_description_sources_information_PIerriDaunt_ISFULAC.pdf. We identified three primary categories. City scale: Cluster 1 (saturated and well-serviced cities); Cluster 2 (vulnerabilized and dense cities); Cluster 3 (low-service and fragmented cities); Municipal scale: Cluster 1 (central, infilling, dense and well-serviced municipalities); Cluster 2 (building up at the edge and vulnerabilized); Cluster 3 (expanding, marginalized and low-density). This dataset supplements the scientific article by Pierri-Daunt and Siedentop (2025), accepted on November 5, 2024, for publication in the Applied Geography journal. This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the Postdoc Mobility grant P500PS_206567, acquired and managed by Ana Beatriz Pierri Daunt

Latin American cities face many problems that compromise them from different angles such as lack of infrastructure, government fragmentation, and environmental degradation. At the same time, each city tries to come up with its own solutions, but there are so many difficulties that in many cases it is difficult to keep attention and efforts focused on all these directions. For these reasons, this research aims to define some of the most common problems faced by cities in Latin America. Disseminating these similarities could help to face those problems, since, if local governments recognize that they face the same situations as their neighbors, they could organize themselves to study them and find solutions. To achieve these objectives, this research reviewed the diagnoses made by hundreds of Best Practice proposals collected in the libraries of UN Habitat and the Dubai International Award for Best Practices. Based on these results, this research built a proposal for the contest "Participatory Projects in Public Space Contest" organized in commemoration of the 450 years of Caracas. This proposal served as a case study where some of these cross-cutting problems in the region were explored. At the same time, the contest served as a framework to make these results public and promote discussion on some of these important issues. Finally, this research links different stages and synthesizes some important efforts that are intended to serve as a reference framework to better understand serious and everyday problems that are manifested in Latin American cities.

IntroductionWe aimed to examine utilitarian bicycle use among adults from 18 large Latin American cities and its association with socio-economic position (education and income) between 2008 and 2018.MethodsData came from yearly cross-sectional surveys collected by the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF). A total of 77,765 survey respondents with complete data were used to estimate multilevel logistic regression models with city as random intercept and year as random slope.ResultsIndividuals with high education and high-income levels had lower odds of using a bicycle compared with participants with lower education and income levels. These associations, however, changed over time with the odds of bicycle use increasing for all groups, especially among individuals with the highest education and income levels.DiscussionOur results confirm the broadening appeal of bicycling across socio-economic positions in several Latin American cities and reinforce the importance of considering policies aimed at supporting and enhancing bicycle travel for all users.

In 2024, Cuzco, Peru, was named the top destination in Latin America by travelers, receiving a score of 87.47. The small southern city of Antigua, Guatemala, followed in second place with a score of nearly 86 points.

Santa María – a Peruvian city located to the west of the Andes mountain range – was the most polluted city in Latin America in 2024, based on fine air particulate matter concentration (PM2.5). That year, the city reported an average PM2.5 concentration of 53.4 micrograms per cubic meter. This was followed by Coyhaique, located in Chile, with an estimated PM2.5 concentration of around 40.5 μg/m³. Pollution in Latin American capitals The Chilean capital, Santiago, registered an average PM2.5 concentration of 21.3 μg/m³ in 2023. Lima, the Peruvian capital, had an estimated PM2.5 concentration of around 19.7 μg/m³, while in the capital of Mexico (Mexico City), air pollution amounted to 22.3 μg/m³. The World Health Organization's air quality standards recommend a maximum annual average concentration of 10 μg/m³. The burden of pollution on health Air particulate pollution has been associated with an increase in mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, as well as development of lung cancer. This is specially concerning considering that nearly 2.8 billion people worldwide are exposed to hazardous levels of air pollution. In particular, South Asia was home to the countries with the highest exposure to hazardous concentrations of air pollution in 2022.

The concentration of people living in small areas has increased in the last decade, with more than half of the world's population living in cities. This is particularly true for Latin America, a region with no particular high contribution to the world total population, but hosts several large cities. The increase in urbanization causes several threats to wildlife that face the loss of their habitat and novel environmental pressures. As the number of wildlife entering cities seems to have increased in the last year, we characterize the temporal and geographical events of a widely distributed carnivore, the puma, Puma concolor. We performed an exhaustive search for media news regarding the sighting, capture, and/or killing of pumas within human settlement areas, and tried to relate them with potential explanatory variables. We found a total of 162 events in Latin America in a period of the last 10 years, particularly concentrated in the year 2020. Most records came from Brazil, followed by Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. Of the total, 41% were only sightings, 58% were captures, and a minor percentage were considered as mascotism. Almost the same number of records came from highly populated areas (cities) than from low populated areas (rural) but with important differences between countries. The countries with more records in urban areas (Brazil and Mexico) showed a larger surface occupied by cities. The countries with most records in rural areas (Argentina and Chile) present the opposite pattern of occupied surface. This might indicate that different percentages of areas dedicated to cities or urban spaces might explain the differences among countries. The most important variable related to puma events in the populated areas was sky brightness, while human density and cattle density explained minor parts. The “anthropause” due to the COVID-19 pandemic might explain the larger number of records from 2020, while the absence of high-quality habitats due to fragmentation and high cattle density, might force the pumas to enter populated areas searching for food. Minor values of night lights could be related to a facilitation of efficiency of foraging behavior. Although some bias might exist in the data, the results should be taken into account as general statements for all analyzed countries.

This dataset includes information about the physical vulnerability and risk perception in the favela Morro do Preventório, URBE Latam's case study neighbourhood in Brazil. The GIS data results were created through participatory data collection with the local communities.

Community leaders and volunteers collaborated to identify factors of physical vulnerability in the neighbourhood, drawing on the expertise of project team members from the British Geological Survey.

The community risk perception data represents the favela community’s perception regarding several types of geohazards and memories of past hazard events in their neighbourhood. The structured risk perception questionnaire (in Excel format) complements the co-produced risk perception GIS data and was co-designed by the community and the project team. Topics covered include socio-demographics and household composition and occupants’ perceptions of the building conditions, as well as memories of past disaster events and damages to the buildings. These datasets result from multiple interactions between the local project team and the community leaders, one of whom was a project team member.

The co-production of the physical vulnerability and risk perception data and risk perception survey led to two outcomes:

1) Fine-grained and richer data on factors of vulnerability and risk in the neighbourhood. Prior to the project, the neighbourhood had been unmapped. The project produced detailed and geospatial risk data. 2) The co-productive activity further strengthened the community’s ability for self-empowerment for risk reduction. Due to the co-productive nature of the data creation process, the data was directly relevant for community initiatives, such as the community bank’s micro-credits, and enabled the community to proactively engage with the municipal government to negotiate policy interventions for risk reduction. The data deposited here are thus a result of a novel collection protocol to generate trusted data for municipal disaster risk reduction policy-making.

URBE Latam addresses the implementation gap between sustainable development and equitable resilience. It will do so by using a transdisciplinary research approach aimed at empowering residents of disaster-prone urban poor neighbourhoods, which will underpin the co-production of enhanced, context-specific understandings of local risks and the integration of the resulting data into decision-making procedures in disaster risk reduction and sustainable development monitoring.

The project is conducted by a highly skilled multi-disciplinary research team (including social sciences, engineering and physical sciences) and adopts a dialogic co-production approach to citizen-generated data which relies upon well-established partnerships with community-based initiatives for local development, education and disaster risk reduction in Rio de Janeiro and Medellin, as well as with governmental agencies involved in disaster risk reduction and local planning and development.

URBE Latam proceeds in four integrated components that seek an enhanced understanding of risks, vulnerabilities and local capabilities in disaster-prone urban areas: first it is centred on the engagement of citizens to generate data to expand understandings of risks at the neighbourhood level; second, citizens engagement in risk will be pursued alongside an analysis of socio-spatial inequalities in resilience and development indicators and policies at city and national level; third, this will lead to the recalibration of environmental risk mapping with citizen-generated data; fourth, these components are articulated and integrated within a framework to facilitate dialogic transformations across the different levels and stakeholders involved.

The process of advancing these outputs will further enable capacity development in local communities and the governments of Rio de Janeiro and Medellin; a process which will be augmented by improving the awareness of stakeholders in other Latin American cities and countries through broader dissemination. Insights from collaboratively produced citizen-generated data will be integrated into the practices of disaster risk management and development monitoring (e.g. SDG reporting) in collaboration with international policymaking agencies, thus enabling transformations towards more equitable disaster risk reduction and sustainable development. As an overarching outcome, the project will enable the transformation of practices, improve knowledge among a diverse range of stakeholders and enhance capacity to promote equitable resilience.

Mexico City was the most competitive city to host business events in Latin America in 2022/2023. The Mexican capital scored 519 points on the Competitive Index, leading runner-up destination Rio de Janeiro by about 27 index points. Two Colombian cities were featured in Latin America's ranking for business conventions in 2022/2023.

Objective: To analyze the relationship between economic conditions and mortality in cities of Latin America.Methods: We analyzed data from 340 urban areas in ten countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and El Salvador. We used panel models adjusted for space‐invariant and time‐invariant factors to examine whether changes in area gross domestic product (GDP) per capita were associated with changes in mortality.Results: We find procyclical oscillations in mortality (i.e., higher mortality with higher GDP per capita) for total mortality, female population, populations of 0–9 and 45+ years, mortality due to cardiovascular diseases, malignant neoplasms, diabetes mellitus, respiratory infections and road traffic injuries. Homicides appear countercyclical, with higher levels at lower GDP per capita.Conclusions: Our results reveal large heterogeneity, but in our sample of cities, for specific population groups and causes of death, mortality oscillates procyclically, increasing when GDP per capita increases. In contrast we find few instances of countercyclical mortality.

We identified opportunities to mitigate riverine flooding, estimating watershed response sensitivity and the potential scope of conservation intervention required for 70 cities in Latin America. Watershed sensitivity to flooding was based on physical watershed characteristics selected from a literature review and includes: watershed shape (roundness), slope, size, drainage density, and sensitivity of flooding due to standardized changes in discharge. Scope of intervention was based on six indicators that represent availability of restoration and preservation activities that mitigate flooding. Activities included: preserving or increasing infiltration, preserving effective pervious area, disconnecting effective impervious area, and preserving or increasing wetland and floodplain storage.

Montevideo, Uruguay's capital, leads Latin American cities with the highest apartment sale prices in 2024, averaging 3,454 U.S. dollars per square meter. This figure surpasses other major metropolitan areas like Mexico City and Buenos Aires, highlighting significant disparities in real estate markets across the region. The data underscores the varying economic conditions and housing demand in different Latin American urban centers. Regional housing market trends While Montevideo tops the list for apartment prices, other countries in Latin America have experienced notable changes in their housing markets. Chile, for instance, saw the most substantial increase in house prices since 2010, with its nominal house price index surpassing 342 points in early 2024. However, when adjusted for inflation, Mexico showed the highest inflation-adjusted percentage increase in house prices, growing by nearly five percent in the first quarter of 2024, contrasting with a global decline of one percent. Home financing in Mexico The methods of home financing vary across Latin America. A breakdown of homeownership by financing method in Mexico reveals that about two-thirds of owner-occupied housing units were financed through personal resources in 2022. Nevertheless, government-backed loans such as Infonavit (Mexico’s National Housing Fund Institute), Fovissste (Housing Fund of the Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers), and Fonhapo (National Fund for Popular Housing), play an important role for homebuyers, with just over 20 percent of home purchases relying on such finance. Bank credit, which offers mortgage loans with interest rates ranging between nine and 12 percent, appeared as a less popular option.

UKRI GCRF project URBE Latam's Work Package 2 aimed to identify windows of opportunity to institutionalise citizen-generated data for disaster risk governance in the case study countries Brazil and Colombia.

The interview partners were selected from the project teams' existing contacts at the national (Colombia, Brazil), subnational (Rio de Janeiro state, Antioquia department) and municipal (Niterói, Medellín) levels and included representatives from disaster risk agencies, planning and statistics offices.

The interviews were conducted in Brazilian Portuguese with the Brazilian stakeholders and in Spanish with the Colombian stakeholders. The interviews aimed to understand the extent to which disaster risk reduction governance processes are equitable. The semi-structured interview schedule started with conceptual definitions, such as questions regarding the interview partners' understandings of "resilience", "risk", "vulnerability", followed by questions regarding the indicators and data to measure these and any related concepts, including the roles of the various data actors, such as questions relating to usage, representativeness, and data quality. In response to the questions, interview partners suggested the following:

• while "resilience" is an important concept, it is not used in disaster risk management and generally understood as
  communities' experiences of and responses to a disaster;

• the legal framework establishes hierarchical relations in risk governance, data sharing across the governance scale and policy happens primarily at the response stage of the disaster risk cycle.

• and that work with communities for prevention is the primary responsibility of municipal "social" teams.

  URBE Latam addresses the implementation gap between sustainable development and equitable resilience. It will do so by using a transdisciplinary research approach aimed at empowering residents of disaster-prone urban poor neighbourhoods, which will underpin the co-production of enhanced, context-specific understandings of local risks and the integration of the resulting data into decision-making procedures in disaster risk reduction and sustainable development monitoring.

The project is conducted by a highly skilled multi-disciplinary research team (including social sciences, engineering and physical sciences) and adopts a dialogic co-production approach to citizen-generated data which relies upon well-established partnerships with community-based initiatives for local development, education and disaster risk reduction in Rio de Janeiro and Medellin, as well as with governmental agencies involved in disaster risk reduction and local planning and development.

URBE Latam proceeds in four integrated components that seek an enhanced understanding of risks, vulnerabilities and local capabilities in disaster-prone urban areas: first it is centred on the engagement of citizens to generate data to expand understandings of risks at the neighbourhood level; second, citizens engagement in risk will be pursued alongside an analysis of socio-spatial inequalities in resilience and development indicators and policies at city and national level; third, this will lead to the recalibration of environmental risk mapping with citizen-generated data; fourth, these components are articulated and integrated within a framework to facilitate dialogic transformations across the different levels and stakeholders involved.

The process of advancing these outputs will further enable capacity development in local communities and the governments of Rio de Janeiro and Medellin; a process which will be augmented by improving the awareness of stakeholders in other Latin American cities and countries through broader dissemination. Insights from collaboratively produced citizen-generated data will be integrated into the practices of disaster risk management and development monitoring (e.g. SDG reporting) in collaboration with international policymaking agencies, thus enabling transformations towards more equitable disaster risk reduction and sustainable development. As an overarching outcome, the project will enable the transformation of practices, improve knowledge among a diverse range of stakeholders and enhance capacity to promote equitable resilience.

This dataset is about book series and is filtered where the books is Modernism in the peripheral metropolis : form, crisis and the city in Latin America, featuring 10 columns including authors, average publication date, book publishers, book series, and books. The preview is ordered by number of books (descending).

This study, conducted in 1961 in Santiago, Chile, investigated past and present occupations of the respondents to ascertain their socioeconomic status within the society and to discover patterns of social and economic mobility. Variables assessed the respondents' satisfaction with their jobs, their feelings of permanence in their jobs, the kind of work done, whether they were self-employed or employed by a public or private institution, the status of their occupations -- from proprietor to unskilled laborer, and their occupations at the time of the interview as well as at age 21, 28, 35, and 45. The past was further explored through questions concerning respondents' fathers and paternal grandfathers and their occupations. The study also explored respondents' awareness and understanding of the world around them at the local, national, and international levels. The focus of these questions ranged from participation in local clubs to opinions about the government of Chile to questions about Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Demographic variables include the respondents' age, gender, marital status, income, nationality, and place of birth.

Argentina scored 562 out of a maximum of 800 points in the English Proficiency Index 2023. That was the highest score among all Latin American countries included in the survey. The Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, also received the highest English proficiency score among all the Latin American cities analyzed. Mexico and Haiti received the lowest scores in the region.

Mexico and Latin America Moving Services Market size was valued at USD 4.0251 Billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 4.795 Billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 2.44% from 2024 to 2031

Mexico and Latin America Moving Services Market Drivers

Urbanization and Housing Demand: Mexico is experiencing rapid urbanization, with a significant portion of the population moving to urban centers in search of better employment opportunities and living conditions. This trend is driving the demand for moving services as people relocate to cities, requiring professional assistance for residential moves.

Rising Middle-Class Population: The expanding middle class in Mexico, with increasing disposable income, is boosting the demand for professional moving services. As more people can afford to purchase homes or upgrade their living spaces, the need for reliable and efficient moving services is growing.

Economic Growth and Infrastructure Development: Several countries in Latin America are experiencing economic growth and infrastructure development, leading to increased real estate activity. As new housing and commercial projects are completed, the demand for moving services rises, particularly in growing urban areas.

Internal Migration and Urbanization: Like Mexico, many Latin American countries are witnessing significant internal migration, with people moving from rural areas to urban centers. This migration fuels the need for moving services as individuals and families relocate to cities in search of better opportunities.

For the past half a century, Latin American scholars have been pointing toward the emergence of new social actors as agents of social and political democratization. The first wave of actors was characterized by the emergence of novel agents—mainly, new popular movements—of social transformation. At first, the second wave, epitomized by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), was celebrated as the upsurge of a new civil society, but later on, it was the target of harsh criticism. The literature often portrays this development in Latin American civil society as a displacement trend of actors of the first wave by the second wave—“NGOization”—and even denounces new civil society as rootless, depoliticized, and functional to retrenchment. Thus, supposedly, NGOization encumbers social change.The authors argue that NGOization diagnosis is a flawed depiction of change within civil society. Rather than NGOization related to the depoliticization and neoliberalization of civil society, in Mexico City and São Paulo, there has been modernization of organizational ecologies, changes in the functional status of civil society, and interestingly, specialization aimed at shaping public agenda. The authors argue that such specialization, instead of encumbering social change, brings about different repertoires of strategies and skills purposively developed for influencing policy and politics.Their argument relies on comparative systematic evidence. Through network analysis, they examine the organizational ecology of civil society in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Supplementary Material 2.