- Institutional Organization of Large Agglomerates    125 kb by    Ainstein, Luis | luisai@fadu.uba.ar    Short Outline Large Agglomerates disintegrate heavily. Globalization and both thematic and scale segmentation of their global management explain this situation. The transition from metropolitan to diffuse regional urban configurations is thus set underway. Abstract The disintegration of Large Urban Agglomerates and the conditions of their institutional organization. The case of Buenos Aires The regional and local impacts of the current process of asymmetrical globalization, set within the frameworks of generalized urban concentration and of prevalently neoliberal public policies become particularly significant as regards their level of incidence upon Large Urban Agglomerates. Such impacts tend to exacerbate up to extreme levels the preexistent patterns of socioeconomic stratification and physical and functional dissociation, giving rise to the emergence of extraordinary levels of global inefficiency and inequity. Within such circumstances, the lack of existence, or of integrated operation, of institutional structures involving the whole of such urban settings become associated with the substantive deepening of the mentioned critical traits, becoming functional towards the accomplishment of the interests associated with the differential appropriation of urban rents, particularly of the ones directly related with the expansion of the built environment, as well as towards the increased tendencies of socio-ecological segregation. It can be postulated that such phenomena stand behind the global conditions that fuel and explain the rupture of the patterns of organization of agglomerates of a metropolitan character, and their mutation towards configurations usually denominated ‘diffuse urban regions’, in which social fragmentation, ambiguous centralities, low levels of aggregate densities, private car-dominated mobility, long residence-to-jobs journeys, and micro jurisdictional autonomies become characteristic. The Buenos Aires Agglomerate, one of the emerging ‘global cities’, becomes a paradigmatic example of the mentioned set of circumstances. During recent decades, the implementation of several integrative proposals regarding its global administration became frustrated, such as the one associated with the purpose of setting up a new national capital, and that connected with the new institutional organization of the ‘central city’ jurisdiction. On the opposite, the subdivisions of some of the conurbated jurisdictions, as well as that of the central city itself became implemented, within scenarios characterized by the amplification of social stratification and exclusion, as well as by increasing levels of global urban diffusion and isolated management. Keywords Disintegration Large Agglomerates Metropolises Urban Regions Urban Management Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2006: Cities between Integration and Disintegration   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper