Latin America is the most unequal and most urbanized region. This statement alone is insufficient to understand the region's particularities. Since the 1990s, we have witnessed four major transformations in Latin America's urban landscape. First, the urbanization cycle has shifted. After a period of high urban growth due to demographic and migratory factors, urban growth rates have slowed. This has led to the observation that we are facing a new urbanization pattern in the region, characterized by dynamics of urban consolidation (UN-Habitat, 2012). Second, the developmentalist economic model gave way to a model characterized as "neoliberal," in which the type of capitalist accumulation has modified labor markets; mechanisms for accessing educational and health institutions; the role of the State; and other aspects (Portes, Roberts, and Grimson, 2008).

Thirdly, there has been a process of urban restructuring - linked to the economic model, globalization, and other aspects - which has a series of territorial impacts and reorganization of the urban structure and form. It is possible to affirm the importance of a “neoliberal city” model, which is expressed in the relevance of markets as an institution that plays a predominant role in the production of urban space, and through the commodification of social and economic life, and of land (in terms of the importance of real estate businesses) (De Mattos, 2014). Fourth, there are a series of transformations in the role of the State (central and subnational government) in terms of urban governance, planning, and public policies. Since the 1980s, the major effort in the region to improve “city governance” has been expressed in State reform through the decentralization of fiscal, political, and administrative powers (to varying degrees) from the central government to subnational governments. In a context where the flows of capital, goods, and services operate selectively across the territory, the subnational level of government faces a series of obstacles in being an actor capable of counterbalancing economic and real estate actors. Furthermore, planning has shifted its focus from plans as instruments privileged to think about the city (with all its limitations) to a partial planning that focuses on "Large Urban Projects" as an expression of the selectivity of capital with respect to the territory (producing and reproducing greater socio-spatial fragmentation).

Within the context of these transformations, obstacles to social inclusion, access to the “right to the city,” and improvements in quality of life persist—and have even intensified. The latest UN-Habitat report (2016) on the state of cities highlights the various problems of the urbanization process in Latin America, where a series of issues remain—precariousness and informality, the existence of areas (slums, informal settlements, etc.) where various structural disadvantages accumulate, generating scenarios characterized by urban marginalization and exclusion—and new problems emerge. Despite the limitations of this type of report in advancing a critical and informed analysis of the region's reality in terms of the current capitalist accumulation model, its call to recognize that the urbanization process is unsustainable should be taken into account.

To this situation must be added the problems inherent to the field of urban research in the region (Carrión and Dammert Guardia, 2016). Following the crisis of the main paradigms of urban research in the region during the 1980s, the subsequent decades have witnessed three fundamental aspects in the field of urban research: a) theorizing about the city in the region has lost importance (despite significant efforts such as those undertaken by the RELATEUR Network); b) there is a return to the public sphere, expressed in the importance that the right to the city has acquired as a demand of social organizations and as a framework for public policy debate; this is threatened by fragmentation trends, the neoliberal imprint on the production of urban space, among other factors; and c) there has been a change in the institutional conditions of academic production (in terms of funding, the role of research centers, and the system of academic dissemination, primarily through journals). Each of these aspects also presents challenges for urban research and debate in the region.

The debate on inequality is not new in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the contrary, there is significant precedent in the region for understanding and explaining the institutional and organizational arrangements through which systems of inequality operate (Pérez Sáinz, 2014). Fundamental questions about these systems of inequality have centered around three axes: a) the labor market; b) the education system; and c) income distribution. In turn, analytical approaches to the study of inequality are typically organized around two main axes: on the one hand, structural perspectives (focusing on distribution patterns, the mechanisms and elements that influence the reproduction of social positions, and how resources are linked to the rewards received for social position); on the other hand, relational perspectives, which are based on the premise that social position (associated with differentiated access) is constituted through interaction among individuals and does not solely depend on fixed or stable attributes (Bottero, 2005). GT's proposal highlights the importance of these two perspectives, which acquire particularities when they form part of a debate regarding contemporary urban processes.

The objective of the “Urban Inequalities Working Group” is to deepen the debate on inequalities in the region by focusing attention on and problematizing urban space as a relevant dimension for understanding the logics of the production and reproduction of inequalities. As various authors point out (Di Virgilio and Perelman, 2014; Segura, 2014), inequalities are multidimensional and multi-scalar phenomena and are reciprocal relationships between the city and inequality (as forms of production and reproduction). Or, in a sense, it can be said that in this relationship (between urban space and inequality) there exists both “unequal access to urban space and urban space as a dimension that impacts the (re)production of inequality” (Segura, 2014: 14). Furthermore, it is a constitutive element of the urbanization process in the region, where different forms of urbanization coexist, configuring distinct “social orders.” This heterogeneity results in “the existence of urban areas with very different and unequal conditions and, therefore, of urban life: quality and quantity of land, housing, infrastructure, facilities and services, environmental conditions, etc.” (Pírez, 2016: 99).

Next, it is important to highlight some of the analytical dimensions that the Working Group (GT) is interested in addressing. First, urban structure and form—as the result of a series of dynamics such as the land and housing market, public investment in infrastructure and services, territorialized labor markets, selective private capital investment, etc.—reproduce patterns of inequality insofar as residents' quality of life, their ability to inhabit the city, and their access to a “right to the city” (understood as active participation in the production of urban space) are conditioned. Second, inequality and the city have been associated through the study of segregation dynamics (primarily residential) related to the location patterns of socioeconomic strata in urban space (Sabatini, Cáceres, and Cerda, 2001). Third, urban inequalities are expressed and configured around flows and circulations (Di Virgilio and Perelman, 2014). In other words, patterns of interaction express, reproduce, and shape dynamics of urban inequality to the extent that there are differentiated ways of inhabiting the city. This comes into play through the experience of public spaces, the cohabitation of spaces, the dynamics of social encounter and interaction between actors occupying differentiated socio-spatial positions, the use of urban services and infrastructure, and other aspects. Fourth, and related to the above, it is important to consider the contributions of authors such as Tilly (1998) regarding categorical inequality as a symbolic matrix that is a constitutive element of systems of inequality, and which has a series of socio-spatial expressions such as marginalization, exclusion, and stigmatization. Fifth, there is a growing concern in studies on tolerance and perception of inequality that is important to problematize based on the spatial manifestations of these processes. Sixth, there is a question about how the unequal logics of capital intervention generate processes of urban transformation in specific areas of the city, as is the case of the debate on gentrification and displacement dynamics (Janoschka and Sequera, 2016).

Given the complex and multidimensional relationship between cities and inequality, it is important to consider various aspects such as: urban structure and form; residential location and segregation processes; socio-spatial fragmentation processes; and the role of the State in terms of policies, services, and management, among others. The objective of the GTDU (Urban Development Working Group) is to address these analytical axes as a starting point to be revisited in the Working Group's activities, expanded upon, and improved through collective work. It is hoped that this will allow for a deeper understanding of inequality systems in the region, based on a commitment to critical and situated knowledge.