Global Connections: Panama City as a Relational City
Open Access
- Author:
- Sigler, Thomas Jason
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 01, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Deryck William Holdsworth, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Deryck William Holdsworth, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Roger Michael Downs, Committee Member
Rodney Allen Erickson, Committee Member
Alexandra Staub, Committee Member - Keywords:
- urban growth
Panama
urban morphology
Latin American cities
real estate
relational city
global cities - Abstract:
- Since the handover of the Panama Canal in 1999, the Panama City, Panama metropolitan area has undergone a rapid physical transformation. In the central city, high-end condominium construction briskly altered the character of older waterfront neighborhoods, while on the peri-urban fringe, the rapid fabrication of mass-produced single-family housing drew the city’s working classes ever farther outward. Driven by strong demand attributable to remarkable economic growth, the first decade of the 21st century was characterized by a construction boom unprecedented in both scope and scale. Drawing theoretical inspiration from a wide body of literature interconnecting the urbanization process with global institutions and phenomena, this dissertation analyzes Panama City’s recent physical transformation from a morphological perspective across a variety of scales, ranging from individual parcels and buildings to the metropolitan area. Utilizing data from interviews, public archives, aerial imagery, and cadastral records, this study applies a unique, mixed-methods approach to investigate specifically how and why Panama City underwent such a rapid transformation, and how that was connected to global forces more broadly. The city features a robust service economy deriving from its connection to the Panama Canal and the adjacent Canal Zone, which was occupied by the United States until 1999. My analysis indicates that a concert of factors hinging upon the city’s intermediary economic role were important in shaping its growth, including particularistic historical, institutional, and political elements that created the proper preconditions for the city to absorb the effects of a dynamic global economy. This indicates considerable deviation from dominant global South urbanization patterns and calls for a new paradigm that I have termed the “relational city”.