[Music] [Narrator:] Urbanization is a phenomenon of our age. By the year 2000, say the demographers, half of us will live in cities. Latin America has already reached that point. Nationwide population growth in Latin Americais serious enough, more than three percent in many areas. But urban growth is five to eight percent and rising. The ancient city was marketplace and seat of authority, organic and manageable. The new city is a mushroom with an uncertain center, amorphous outlines, and a high potential for massive disaster. To a certain extent and for a limited time, we possess the power to stave off or at least to ameliorate that disaster. We need first to understand the dimensions of what looms on the horizon. [The City:] [Implications for the Future] [Traffic noises] [Narrator:] For the last two decades, Bogota, Colombia, to take one example, has had an annual growth rate of 7.4 percent. Part of the growth is the classic demographic pattern of lower death rates and steady or growing birth rates. But much of it comes from increasing numbers of migrants from the countryside. They come to the city under two primary imperatives: the push of the countryside, which can no longer sustain them, the pull of the city, which has drawn restless people from the countryside since cities began. The young people are the first to come and the first to meet frustration. They have little education, no skills away from farming, and they do the odd jobs the city offers to its immigrants, no more than a means to survive. The sad fact is that as most industrialized societies are now constituted, people who need jobs the city offers do not possess the skills to do them. The energetic or desperate ones become scavengers in the waste of the more affluent ones. So they wait, sometimes hungry, sometimes angry, these people who should be at the peak of their productive years, and in any case, are ironically at the peak of their reproductive years. The result of a growing population of immigrants into the deceptively promising city is, to put it brutally, a generation of surplus children. There is not a major city in the world without its rootless youngsters. Some are simply more visible than others. What brings them here? What has always brought country people to cities? They will say for better opportunities. What they will mean down deep is a hunger for lights and noise and consumer goods, all the old magnets. But to buy these gaudy pleasures, they need money, get it how they may. So they come to the city, and the city grows. [Music] Why do they leave the country? The simplest reason is that the increasing growth rate has outstripped the ability of small landholdersto care for their families. Inherited parcels of land are smaller by the generation. [Music] [Tractor noises] Industrialized farming is another strong factor. Little by little, the best land is absorbed into commercially profitable holdings. The small farmer, as is true in developed and developing countries alike, is usually the loser. [Music] Many farmers have simply given up to seek an unknown destiny in the city. They bring with them, inevitably, the rural pattern of life, which has always been flexible. There was always room for another pair of hands and food for another mouth. And yet even the most optimistic farmer saw that is shrinking acreage could barely support him and would surely not allow him to fulfill any ambitions for his children. [Music] [Sheep bleating] They see the city as another chance, a chanceto change and perhaps to prosper. So the rural poor become the urban poor. [Music] They come to the city with dreams of splendid housing. And they must come to terms with their dreams in the barrios and favelas and callampas where a house is whatever ingenuity and yearning can create. [Music] It would be a mistake to regard the situation as tragically fixed and immutable. It is fluid, and it has elements of hope. Most rural families bring with them rural traditions. They plant flowers and kitchen gardens. They keep sheep and chickens in the muddy lanes. [Music] Often the first money to appear in the barrios comes through the young women, who find jobs more readily than their men folk as domestic servants. Thus, they begin the subtle pull away from the rural tradition. [Music] Ingenuity plays a lively role. Electricity is something which can with effort be acquired informally. Although it is insufficient and uncertain, it is better than darkness. [Music] They take water where they find it, as they did in the countryside. A stream in the bottom of a ravine in the barrios is less clean than a stream in the country, but it is no less a community gathering place. The only reliable continuum between country and city may well be the focus upon family. The large, useful, busy farm family is an alluring picture and a powerful tradition to circumvent, but the picture is regrettably different here. The workforce cannot absorb extra hands. The children have literally no place to play, no room to grow. They are subject to the pressures of the city themselves. Youngsters are too vulnerable to those who begin to use them as errand boys or car guards and too often guide them into more lucrative, less legal occupations. [Music] One of the many changes which must take place in the shift from country to city is the shift away from the large farm family. And one of the services society must offer, in its way no less vital than sewagedisposal and potable water, is the task of making available to these barrio women the means of controlling their fertility. But how? A new clinic in every barrio? Colombia has developed another way, and thus far, it has worked. Provision of contraceptive services along classic clinic lines would mean a whole new health infrastructure in these feverish little satellite cities. The private family planning organization Profamilia, backed up by the municipal and federal maternal and child health systems, has established a network of distribution posts to which barrio women can come for pills and other non-clinical contraceptive methods. The core of the procedure is that these women visit women they know where they can get supplies and guidance from their peers. They are not required to submit to elaborate questioning or to examination. Their providers of service are women who, like themselves, came from the countryside and know its ways. [Spanish speaking] Elena proves the persistence of those ways. She has come from the far side of the city where, after two hours and an expensive bus ride, she has taken lunch to her husband, a factory laborer. She took lunch to him in the field when they lived in the country, and he is unwilling to surrender this amenity in the city. But with her new responsibilities, Elena is gaining independence. And this costly bit of nostalgia will probably disappear one day. [Spanish speaking] [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] The recruitment of competent and enthusiastic distributors has become an artful technique in itself. What is sought is someone who has leadership qualities. The distributor becomes the core element in the indigenous infrastructure of service to the barrios. Carmen owns a small general store in the front room of her house and is president of the local Acción Comunal. Her teenage daughter helps her and has been trained to furnish supplies in her absence. A whole generation of barrio children is becoming familiar with family planning principles. They are moving away from the old taboos of the countryside. [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] Provision of oral contraceptives is the primary activity, but it is supported by a strong backup system. Carmen refers any client with problems to the nearest clinic or health center. [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] We have spoken of distributors as women, and most of them are. But all members of the distributor's family are able on occasion to fill in. [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] Nelly is ill, but her husband, who manages the store with her, knows the drill and is an able amateur apostle of the principles of responsible parenthood. Men still find it easier to engage in these conversations with men, as women with women. [Spanish speaking] [Spanish speaking] [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] If there is a single factor involvedin the provision of family planning in the new satellite settlements, it is that they must be designed with the needs of the migrants in mind. This is a start, but only a start. There are clinics, private, municipal, and federal, offering primary health care and family planning services throughout the city. They provide a functioning network of service. But compared to the need, it is a frail structure indeed. [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] The new young migrants and the growing percentage of all city residents under 20 years of age mean that the city's reproductive base has been substantially broadened. Each individual reaching sexually active age will need information and guidance and service to plan families responsibly. It is not a question of community based distribution through stores and households or clinic distribution along traditional lines. Both will be needed and on a far larger scale than ever before. [Spanish speaking] [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] Whatever is now being done must be expanded and accelerated until all women at risk pf pregnancy, whether resident in the barrios or in the city itself, have access to the means of spacing or limiting their childbearing. [Spanish speaking] [Narrator:] When we regard the physical aspects of the new city, we have cause for concern, though not necessarily for alarm. Without much more than the instinct which makes even the poorest campesino eventually tug at his own bootstraps, the shanty towns begin to take on the dimensions of suburbia. There have been government plans and public housing, but they have not often succeeded in their aims. Where they have, it was because they were guided by the recognized needs of the barrios. A man can and will build his own house, and his wife will make curtains for the windows and plant flowers in the dooryard. [Music] Start with the assumption that the urbanization of Latin America is irreversible. Give heed to the voices of the people who have chosen to live in the barrios' miseries until the day when they can be absorbed with a measure of comfort, and more important, a measure of dignity into the life of the city. For certain needs, they expect and deserve high level help, clean water, even if it comes from community taps with jury-rigged distribution systems. [Music] Some reasonable means of sewage disposal, however simple. Electric power, available not only in the downtown discotheques but above their own supper tables. [Music] Access to telephones, passable streets, publictransport, and supporting all that, jobs and schooling. The energy which brought the campesinos to the city will help them to build in it. [Music] The migrant from the countryside was making the growth of Latin American cities irreversible as a centuries old pro-natalist tradition. He is accustomed to regard a family of five or six children as entirely normal. But he can no longer expect that two or three of them will die in infancy, for this has changed radically in the last decade. So those children will grow up and have children of their own. And each of those children, and their children, and their children will need not only food, clothing, shelter, and education, but the whole range of public services which make life in the city possible. [Music] If the provision of family planning services becomes universal and carries with it the creation of a sense of social responsibility on the part of all citizens, it can be a potent development tool. [Music] If the rural tradition of large families can be reversed, we can slow the nightmare growth of the new city by the end of the century.