Key points
- About half of Latin America's 42 million Indigenous people live in cities, according to the World Bank.
- Irazábal: cities were built on dispossessed Indigenous lands and metropolitan expansion repeats the pattern.
- Gutiérrez Aguilar: El Alto and Cochabamba show how the city turned communal forms into political power.
Indigenous peoples' rights in the city are the question of how to recognise territory, culture, consultation and participation for communities whose lands were taken by urban expansion or who now live, for the most part, in cities: according to the World Bank, about half of Latin America's 42 million Indigenous people are urban, and in Canada, Australia or New Zealand the share exceeds 60 percent. The United Nations Declaration of 2007 and ILO Convention 169 of 1989 recognise rights to land, prior consultation and identity, but they were conceived for rural territories, and the city remains the place where those rights are most easily ignored. Clara Irazábal and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar have studied that tension from planning and from social movements.
Clara Irazábal: cities built on dispossessed lands
Irazábal, a Venezuelan planner who has researched planning across Latin America, shows that the region's cities were built on Indigenous lands taken without consultation or compensation, and that metropolitan expansion follows the same pattern: the original peoples on the edge of Mexico City, Mapuche communities around Santiago or the ejidos absorbed by Mexican cities lose land to highways, subdivisions and industrial estates, and their demands for territorial recognition are subordinated to economic development. Her critique targets a planning that does not see Indigenous people as rights-holders but as obstacle or folklore.
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar: El Alto, Cochabamba and communal power
Gutiérrez Aguilar, a Mexican mathematician and sociologist who lived through Bolivia's cycles of mobilisation, analysed in Rhythms of the Pachakuti (2008) the struggles of 2000 to 2005: the Cochabamba water war, the Aymara blockades of the altiplano and the gas war of El Alto in 2003, which drove out a president and opened the way to the plurinational Constitution of 2009. Her analysis shows that the city, El Alto in particular, was the stage where migrant Indigenous communities reorganised their communal forms of decision-making and turned them into political power. She also warns that legal recognition, even in a plurinational state, does not guarantee effective protection against extractivism and urbanization.
Land, consultation, housing and censuses: the urban conflicts
The concrete urban conflicts recur. The loss of land and sacred sites to infrastructure: hills, lagoons and communal forests turned into developable land. Exclusion from planning: original peoples are rarely consulted on plans affecting their territories, and when consultation exists it is carried out as a formality. Discrimination in housing and employment, which concentrates urban Indigenous people in informal settlements. And statistical invisibility, because many censuses do not record Indigenous identity in the city, erasing the population from policy.
Mexico City, Vancouver, Bolivia: responses of recognition
Responses exist. Mexico City recognised in its 2017 Constitution the original peoples and neighbourhoods and resident Indigenous communities, with rights to consultation and to the city. Bolivia and Ecuador have incorporated plurinationality. In Canada, cities such as Vancouver develop plans with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations on whose unceded territory the city stands, and in New Zealand the law requires Māori participation in planning. The common keys are territorial recognition, binding consultation, representation in decision-making bodies and the production of data that make the urban Indigenous population visible.
The lesson of Irazábal and Gutiérrez Aguilar is that the city is not the end of Indigenous life but one of its territories, and that planning owes a debt of recognition. Planning with Indigenous peoples means accepting that the city stands on lands with history and rights, giving voice to those who lived there and those who have migrated to it, and learning from communal forms of managing water, land and decisions that the colonial city tried to erase. A city that does so expands citizenship; one that does not prolongs colonisation by means of the plan.
Frequently asked questions
What rights do Indigenous peoples have in cities?
The UN Declaration of 2007 and ILO Convention 169 recognise rights to land, prior consultation and identity, but they were conceived for rural territories; cities such as Mexico City, since its 2017 Constitution, or Vancouver, with the nations of its territory, have begun to apply them in the urban realm.
How does urban expansion affect Indigenous peoples?
Through the loss of land and sacred sites to infrastructure and subdivisions, exclusion from planning, discrimination in housing and employment that concentrates them in informal settlements, and statistical invisibility in censuses that do not record urban Indigenous identity.
