Cities From Scratch

Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America

By: Brodwyn Fischer (Editor)

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Paperback | 28 February 2014

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302 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.6

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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 exposes, Cities from Scratch intervenes by considering Latin American shantytowns at a new level of interdisciplinary complexity.

Contributors. Javier Auyero, Mariana Cavalcanti, Ratao Diniz, Emilio Duhau, Sujatha Fernandes, Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Edward Murphy, Dennis Rodgers

Industry Reviews

"Cities from Scratch offers a surprisingly fresh take on slums, ghettoes, and shantytowns, classic topics in the social sciences. Based on solid empirical work, the essays are notable for the contributors' attention to local situations and politics, and their willingness to allow the research, rather than theoretical assumptions, to determine their findings." - Jose C. Moya, author of Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 "This is an excellent collection of innovative, often bracing, reflections on crucial issues of cities and citizenship. In their essays, the contributors think outward from carefully detailed local cases, taking broader theories to task while developing valuable new methodological and conceptual tools. This collection represents both a coming of age and a new point of departure for historical and social scientific study of the informal city." - Mark Healey, author of The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake "Writings on shantytowns or 'informal neighbourhoods' of Rio de Janeiro, Managua, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City." - Chronicle of Higher Education

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