Latin American citizens have a clear sense of what is wrong with their cities. They want safer streets, better hospitals, and governments that are transparent and accountable. What they are not prioritizing are the structural changes that would fix those problems at their root. This disconnect runs deeper than it first appears, and it is remarkably consistent throughout the region. Residents are identifying symptoms, not causes.
What citizens say they need
Across 13 Latin American cities, residents are clear about what matters most. Security tops the list at 72.4% of their priorities. Health services follow at 53.7%. Corruption and transparency come third at 49.2%. These priorities emerge under conditions of chronic stress and institutional distrust.
Less visible, but more consequential, is what residents place at the bottom of the list. Civic engagement registers at just 9.4%, the lowest of all dimensions measured. Social mobility and inclusiveness come in at 12.6%. School education, long seen as a main driver of social progress, reaches only 23.0% and in most cities ranks below road congestion.
A clear inconsistency emerges. Residents rank corruption and transparency as a top-three concern, but treat civic participation, the mechanism through which accountability is built, as an afterthought. In effect, they identify the problem but deprioritize the mechanism that would address it. This is not an isolated finding. Across cities as different as Guatemala City, Lima, and Santiago, the pattern holds. There is high concern for outcomes, low investment in the processes that produce them.
The question is not whether these priorities are legitimate. They clearly are. The question is why the mechanisms to address them remain so consistently out of view.
Tunnel vision
This pattern has a clear explanation. Researchers call this “tunneling“. When people face pressing constraints related to income, safety, or access to basic services, those constraints capture attention and crowd out longer-term considerations. Decision-making shifts toward what is immediate and urgent. Broader, systemic concerns fall out of focus because daily life leaves little room for them.
Across the region, the same pattern is evident. When asked whether residents would accept face recognition technologies to reduce crime, majorities in every city said yes, reaching 82.4% in Medellín, 78.4% in Rio de Janeiro, and 71.2% in San José. Residents are willing to surrender privacy, one of the most fundamental civil liberties, in exchange for security.
Those same cities score poorly on digital civic participation, with little confidence that online platforms for proposing ideas have improved city life. People are willing to give up rights to address symptoms but show little confidence in the tools that would give them a voice over the underlying causes.
This dynamic is widespread across Latin American cities. People are in permanent triage mode, addressing symptoms while the conditions that generate them go untreated. A city where people do not engage politically cannot hold governments accountable for failing health systems. A society where social mobility is structurally blocked will keep reproducing the inequality that feeds crime. What residents place at the bottom of the list helps sustain what they identify as most urgent.
Patterns and exceptions
Not every city fits the regional pattern. San Salvador stands out. In this case, security registers at just 4.8%, far below the regional average, while affordable housing (65.6%), road congestion (56.0%), and health services (50.4%) dominate resident concerns. Economic pressures take precedence over physical safety, and public attention shifts toward what is perceived as most immediate.
San Salvador also scores among the lowest in the region on social mobility and inclusiveness, at just 7.2%, second only to Mexico City’s 2.4%. When structural immobility is significant but rarely surfaces as a stated concern, it raises a question relevant across the region about whether the most consequential long-term challenges receive the civic attention they deserve. The drivers may differ from city to city, but the structural gap between what citizens experience and what they demand remains a consistent feature of the regional landscape.
A survey of stated priorities cannot establish causation. People may have disengaged not because they do not value civic participation, but because repeated experience has taught them it produces little. Low engagement scores may reflect rational disillusionment as much as genuine indifference. If that is the case, the region faces more than a misalignment of priorities. It faces a form of democratic atrophy. The capacity for collective political action weakens when it is most needed.
From diagnosis to action
Urban policy debates often focus on technology, but the main constraint lies elsewhere. What matters more is harder to build. It is the institutional and civic conditions that help people think beyond the immediate. This requires governments that earn trust through consistent and transparent action, educators who help citizens develop the skills and confidence to participate, and leaders willing to address structural conditions rather than manage their symptoms.
It also requires cities to measure not only what they deliver to residents, but how well they enable residents to shape what gets delivered. On that front, most Latin American cities have significant ground to cover.
The region is not short of relevant experience. From participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires to community-led urban planning in Medellín, there are models worth building on. But these remain exceptions rather than the rule, and their impact on citizen trust and long-term priorities has been limited. Scaling what works, and understanding why promising models have remained isolated, may be as important as any technological investment.
Across Latin America’s cities, people have clear priorities but face pressures that keep displacing longer-term concerns. Helping people look beyond the immediate, without dismissing the pressures they face, may be one of the most important commitments cities can make.
Autor
Senior Economist at the IMD World Competitiveness Center. PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick and a Master's degree in Social Sciences and Government from Harvard University.
