The real Latin America exists below the sensational headlines about Hugo Chávez, shrinking rainforests and cocaine wars. But walk around Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires and you are struck not by a sense of crisis but by a mood – you might even, slightly pretentiously, call it a zeitgeist – that these cities are on the move.

Latin America is too diverse to be pigeonholed. Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are developing and poor, but much of the continent is very different. Santiago’s skyscraper-filled city center feels like Spain, albeit with the Andes as a backdrop. Different parts of the elegant Argentine capital have the vibe of Milan and Paris. Even the teeming cities of Brazil are nothing like Mumbai or Delhi.

A few days in almost any South American capital is enough to make it clear that renewal is in the air. It’s easy, when talking to business leaders and politicians, to see why the region is emerging, once again, as a player in the outsourcing market. As Latin America was the original destination for American firms looking to outsource in the 1980s, but lost out on cost to China and India, the business has almost come full circle.

But Latin America’s new approach to outsourcing is not the same as the ‘Chindia’ model, as it draws on very different specialist skills.

Brazil, for example, is already a world leader in biofuels, and its deserved reputation for innovation is the result of putting public money into research and coming up with incentives to create demand. The country’s central bank chief, Henrique Meirelles, predicts that the Brazilian economy will grow by 4.5% this year – regardless of the US slowdown – and last year its productivity grew faster than that of the US. [...]

via Design Council | Design Council Magazine | Design Council Magazine issue 4 | The Latin American renaissance.

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• Brazilian design featured on Computer Arts Magazine’s “Viva Brasil” article
• Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum talk about the “Best Design From Brazil”
• Brazil featured on Advertising Age’s “The Best of Latin American Marketing in 2009″
• Brazilian lectures at the Taipei 2011 IDA Congress

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