The Latin American subcontinent appears to have reinvented itself in the 21st century. Its economy has been transformed under liberalization and globalisation. Decentralization and the democratic transition have modified the political environment, while local development approaches are replacing the (grand) national-regional development schemes. The current local governance and local development debates refer to very different levels of scale: from small, rural communities to fairly extensive (even international) spaces. It is clear that the development process shows substantial differences between large and small cities, and between core regions and remote rural areas. Indeed, the heterogeneity of the process is strongly influenced by national, regional and local contexts. The empirical studies in this volume show the diversity and complexity of local governance and local development in Latin America, while avoiding stereotypes about the impact of public sector reform and administrative decentralization.

The increasingly urbanized world has created various problems of environment, climate, consumption of resources, and public health, which are closely linked to the side-effects of urbanization such as sprawl, congestion, housing affordability and loss of open space. Fundamental to the urban problems are two separate yet related issues: urban structure and urban dynamics. The chapters collected in this book present an excellent profile of the current state of geospatial analysis and modelling, and demonstrate how these approaches can contribute to the study of various urban issues. The book addresses key themes including new ways of capturing data digitally at the individual level, the development of systems based around networks, the notion of linking hierarchy to networks to morphology as in complexity theory, and the development of new ways of integrating diverse urban processes through simulation paying careful attention to the basic econometric and statistical principles of spatial analysis.