All Rights ReservedGuzman, Santiago Sanchez2025-02-072025-02-072016978-85-7785-551-1https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/2582Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the southFollowing the development tendency seen during the last 65 years in Latin America, the Colombian population has been concentrated in urban poles in a rapid “urbanization process”. While this exponential growth tendency has influenced several positive economic effects but also several negative environmental impacts, it has not been successful per se in reducing social and spatial inequalities, questioning the effectiveness of policy making institutions particularly in guarantee equivalent spatial distribution and access to social and human resources as education, health, justice, security and/or even trade for urban citizens. Only in Bogota, and according to the mayor Office in 2003 mostly 55,3% of the city’s population, almost 3.5 million inhabitant, where living in absolute poverty. Thus, instead of “urbanized environments” these growth processes have stimulated highly dense and segregated “agglomerated fragments” with an unbalanced distribution of social services and discontinuous infrastructure networks which have contributed to positioning Latin American, and especially Colombian cities, as some of the most unequal places in the world. ”One thing is clear: Latin American nations continue to wrestle with many of the same problems they have wrestled with for decades- uneven growth with high levels of poverty and the world’s highest levels of inequality; ineffective state institutions that deliver limited benefits to often a highly restricted minority of the population”.EnglishopenAccessconferenceObject453-456