A Necessary Man - 2

PART II: INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION
[From the text "Milton Santos (1926-2001), A Necessary Man" (2001), by Miguel Panadero Moya Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha]

The international community has recognized the value of his contributions, bestoying him with academic distinctions such as Doctor Honoris Causa in the Universities of Toulouse, France, the Complutense de Madrid and Barcelona, Spain; Federal de Bahia, Federal de Sergipe; Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, Estadual de Ceará, de Passo Fundo and the Estadual del Sudoeste of Bahia, all in Brasil; and the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina. Finally, in 1994, he was awarded the Vautrin Lud Prize, the highest international scientific distinction in the field of geography. With the publishing of his final book "O mundo do cidadâo. Um cidadâo do mundo", colleagues from all parts of the world, professors and students from the University of Sâo Paulo, celebrated his 70th birthday. It is this work which also attests to Milton Santos' presence in Spain since the mid-eighties. It was at this time when Milton Santos returned to teach to Sâo Paulo. His theories were by then well-known to Spanish geographers. In university bibliographies his works were cited profusely, and one of his books, published by Oikos-Tau in Barcelona under the title of Geografía y economía urbanas en los países subdesarrollados (1973), was no doubt one of his dearest, as was his contribution about "La urbanización dependiente de Venezuela" included in M. Castells' book "Imperialismo y urbanización en América Latina" published that same year by Gustavo Gili. Other works include L' espace partagé (1975), Por uma geografía nova (1978), Pobreza urbana (1978), El trabajo del geógrafo en el Tercer Mundo (1978), Espaço e sociedade (1979), Economía Espacial (1979), Pensando o espaço do homem (1982), Ensaios sobre a urbanizaçao latinoamericana (1982), which were less widely received. Being aware of this situation, Professor Milton Santos readily accepted an invitation to take part in our initial debates on theoretical and methodological frameworks applied to the analysis of urbanization in Latin-America.

We therefore organised the "Conference on Urban Planning and Underdevelopment in Latin America", an event which took place on the Albacete campus of the University of Castilla-La Mancha during the harsh February of 1986. John Cole and Milton Santos were speakers at this event, and in the animated debates that followed their presentations, various Spanish colleagues who participated soon gained their friendship and esteem. I will never forget my first meeting with our guest at the Madrid airport. Squeezed into his elegant navy blue overcoat, he was protecting himself from the contrast between the torrid Sâo Paulo summer he had just left and our icy winter. We then had a friendly and regrettably short walk through the streets of old Madrid before coming to Albacete, the final destiny of his trip.

The conference offered Professor Milton Santos a forum for the teachings and scientific worries that guided his thoughts in those moments. He spoke of the characteristics of the New International Order, of the "globalization" of social phenomena, of the growing interconnection among events around the world. During the second half of the eighties, he perceived a set of deep changes, generalized and immediate, which extended throughout the entire world, and whose first consequence was an accentuation of dependent relations. He reminded us of the growing importance of information under these circumstances, and the urgency of an "informational society" whose originality lay in giving new meaning to all geographical objects and spatial distributions.

To illustrate the development of these phenomena, he went on to present an expressive description of some characteristic processes in large metropolitan areas, with the example of Sâo Paulo, which perhaps after that of Bahia, received the most attention from our guest. He traced the distribution of social classes and income levels in urban space and also indicated some consequences derived from the size of metropolitan cities upon their poorest inhabitants, on their accessibility, and on their unequal participation in urban services. He pointed out the existing relations between size and speculation, the rapid increase of land values in the disadvantaged city peripheries when investments improve their infrastructures, along with the simultaneous expulsion process of their poor inhabitants toward places more distant, degraded and bare. Finally, he spoke of the inconsistency of the planning proposals imported from the "North" and the necessity of resorting to indigenous models to relegate the useless "modernity by imposition" of these importations. He emphasized, with the vibrating and alluring tone of his speech, the geographer's role in planning and what his priorities should be, inviting our scientific community to illustrate for other disciplines the applicable spatial modalities of productivity for each country. Other themes were also discussed, such as the changes taking place in the territory itself and the need to forget "prejuicios", which give way to inertia, and the need for confronting this social inertia with action.