Procesos de Configuración Regional y Localidades de Uruguay 1900-1960

The objective of the article is to describe the social structure of Uruguay at the beginning of the sixties, presenting the social differences that configured the level of urban centers or localities since the beginning of the 20th century. The willing is to identify what historical processes would have intervened to have institutionalized a highly heterogeneous distribution of welfare in the territory. The sources of information are four: (i) the population censuses of 1908 and 1963; (ii) the agricultural censuses of 1908, 1951, 1956 and 1961; (iii) the work of historical demography; and (iv) the indices published by the General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses in 1971 and 1989. Due to the lack of a dictionary of the localities, the authors matched these sources. The regional configuration processes analyzed here are: the departmentalization of the territory; the agriculturization; the industrialization and the balnearización. In each case, the regional and local impact of the political, economic and social transformation is analyzed. The article dedicate a wide space to describe the changes in the entity, the legal status, the territorial distribution and the wellbeing of the localities, marking especially those under 1500 inhabitants, which make up an important micro-urbanization of the country. The foundation of 70% of the localities occurred during the reformist period that locates that project as a type of "social democratic" State with its "Bismarkian" type traits. The institutionalization of these territories is based on their precarious and very poor character, the inequality in the most elementary welfare enjoyed by the established towns and cities increases. The processes of spatialization that reconfigured the territory during this time, contributed to the urbanization and population relocation, but in a framework in the political project of the "small model country" did not plan on the territory, the state have no special attention to correct the asymmetries in local welfare distribution structures. We finished with the hypothesis that beyond the social advances of the "Battlista" period, the territorial inequality of opportunities has grown between 1908 and 1963 because the lack of a public planification.