Cities From Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America

by Brodwyn Fischer (Editor), Bryan McCann (Editor), Javier Auyero (Editor)

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

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 29, 2014

Reviews

[S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Informality itself extends far beyond the reaches of poverty. Slums have been written about often, even incessantly, an instantly recognizable emblem of almost every perceived social ill. Much of this writing is vivid, lustrously repelling, enthralling enough to be termed slum pornography and sweeping enough to articulate theories of universal injustice."
Exhaustive infos and history about slums and informal sets in Latin America, yet concisely focused on housing informality...

[Naomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like any book of academic essays, some of these are really interesting and some of them were less inspiring. The combination of various cities helped strengthen parallels and arguments about the informal cities. But the essays still focused on dispelling myths about slums and their inhabitants and so felt more like saying it isn't X instead of they are Y.