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This collection of essays challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor. Until recently, scholars have mainly viewed these settlements through the prisms of crime and drug-related violence, modernization and development theories, populist or revolutionary politics, or debates about the cultures of poverty. Yet shantytowns have proven both more durable and more multifaceted than any of these perspectives foresaw. Far from being accidental offshoots of more dynamic economic and political developments, they are now a permanent and integral part of Latin America's urban societies, critical to struggles over democratization, economic transformation, identity politics, and the drug and arms trades. Integrating historical, cultural, and social scientific methodologies, this collection brings together recent research from across Latin America, from the informal neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Managua and Buenos Aires. Amid alarmist exposés, Cities from Scratch intervenes by considering Latin American shantytowns at a new level of interdisciplinary complexity.
Contributors. Javier Auyero, Mariana Cavalcanti, Ratão Diniz, Emilio Duhau, Sujatha Fernandes, Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Edward Murphy, Dennis Rodgers
List of contents
Introduction / Brodwyn Fischer 1
1. A Century in the Present Tense: Crisis,Politics, and the Intellectual History of Brazil's Informal Cities / Brodwyn Fischer 9
2. In and Out of the Margins: Urban Land Seizures and Homeownership in Santiago, Chile / Edward Murphy 68
3. Troubled Oasis: The Intertwining Histories of the Morro dos Cabritos and Bairro Peixoto / Bryan McCann 102
4.
Compadres,
Vecinos, and
Bróderes in the Barrio: Kinship, Politics, and Local Territorialization in Urban Nicaragua / Dennis Rodgers 127
5. The Informal City: An Enduring Slum or a Progressive Habitat? / Emilio Duhau 150
6. The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro / Ratão Diniz (with captions by Bryan McCann) 170
7. Informal Cities and Community-Based Organizing: The Case of the Teatro Alameda / Sujatha Fernandes 185
8. Threshold Markets: The Production of Real-Estate Value between the "Favela" and the "Pavement" / Mariana Cavalcanti 208
9. Toxic Wasting: Flammable Shantytown Revisited / Javier Auyero 238
Bibliography 263
Contributors 285
Index 287
About the author
Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Javier Auyero, eds.
Summary
Offers a collection of essays that challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor.
