Cities From Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355337 ISBN 13: 9780822355335

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

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

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brodwyn Fischer is Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro.

Bryan McCann is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is the author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil, both also published by Duke University Press.

Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina, Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition, Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita, all also published by Duke University Press.

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CITIES FROM SCRATCH

POVERTY AND INFORMALITY IN URBAN LATIN AMERICA

By BRODWYN FISCHER, Bryan McCann, JAVIER AUYERO

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5533-5

Contents

Introduction Brodwyn Fischer, 1, 
One · A Century in the Present Tense: Crisis, Politics, and the Intellectual History of Brazil's Informal Cities Brodwyn Fischer, 9, 
Two · In and Out of the Margins: Urban Land Seizures and Homeownership in Santiago, Chile Edward Murphy, 68, 
Three · Troubled Oasis: The Intertwining Histories of the Morro dos Cabritos and Bairro Peixoto Bryan McCann, 102, 
Four · Compadres, Vecinos, and Bróderes in the Barrio: Kinship, Politics, and Local Territorialization in Urban Nicaragua Dennis Rodgers, 127, 
Five · The Informal City: An Enduring Slum or a Progressive Habitat? Emilio Duhau, 150, 
Six · The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro Ratão Diniz (with captions by Bryan McCann), 170, 
Seven · Informal Cities and Community-Based Organizing: The Case of the Teatro Alameda Sujatha Fernandes, 185, 
Eight · Threshold Markets: The Production of Real-Estate Value between the "Favela" and the "Pavement" Mariana Cavalcanti, 208, 
Nine · Toxic Waiting: Flammable Shantytown Revisited Javier Auyero, 238, 
Bibliography, 263, 
Contributors, 285, 
Index, 287, 

CHAPTER 1

A Century in the Present Tense

CRISIS, POLITICS, AND THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF BRAZIL'S INFORMAL CITIES

Brodwyn Fischer

In 2006 an impressive array of luminaries graced the cover of Mike Davis's Planet of Slums, extolling it as "magisterial," "profound," and "brilliant," the latest word on the future of the global city. Davis's book began with a neo-Malthusian analysis of "the urban climacteric," in which he dramatized the impending "watershed" moment when the world would become more urban than rural. He provided a fearful description of what such accelerated urbanization implied: "Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay."

Davis sketched a meta-analysis of global slum development in which only the poor escaped blame. Colonial oppressors, populist national governments, urban planners, military dictatorships, international aid agencies, NGOs, and neoliberal policymakers had collectively failed to create a cityscape capable of accommodating an undifferentiated global army of underemployed, unempowered, and sub-urbanized human beings. The result was "peri-urban poverty," "the radical new face of inequality," "a grim human world largely cut off from the subsistence solidarities of the countryside as well as disconnected from the cultural and political life of the traditional city." Here, in an atmosphere of chronic unemployment and environmental catastrophe, little was beyond the pale: Davis invoked drug trafficking, armed violence, organ sale and theft, terrorism, and even witchcraft as signs of "an existential ground zero beyond which there are only death camps, famine, and Kurtzian horror."

When it came to Latin America, however, the power of Davis's scathing critique derived from moral resonance rather than intimate knowledge. Davis's doomsday prose draped rickety empirical scaffolding; an accumulation of inaccuracies that together created an ill-defined caricature of the actual features and dynamics of Latin America's poorest neighborhoods. His errors—mischaracterized neighborhoods, misused Spanish words, mistaken historical facts, misplaced cities—were individually petty. But they would have been immediately obvious to any local inhabitant, and suggest collectively that local perspectives had little role in shaping Davis's confident exposé. Davis's sense of the informal cities' history extended back only a generation or two, and his analysis of the social, economic, and political networks that sustained these intensely local places was thin. Despite an attempt at typology, Davis's focus was simply too broad for the world's urban poor to emerge as anything but an undifferentiated suffering mass. This was clearly—and ironically—an argument built from the top down, aimed at marshaling evidence of urban disaster to indict the global order's unjust march.

Given the ubiquity of urban injustice, it is tough to fault Davis too much for his unsound detail. He meant to jolt a general public into awareness of the worst things that are happening in the world's dystopic "edge cities," and in this he succeeded in spades. What is significant about Davis's approach, however, is that it is the rule, not the exception. The sacrifice of local, grassroots analysis for urgent, sweeping political argument began at the very nineteenth-century moment when shantytowns emerged as distinct urban phenomena; since then, the urgency of now has reigned supreme. Poor, informal cities have emerged as symptoms of present-day ills, or as bellwethers of terrible or (rarely) utopian futures. Critics have associated such neighborhoods with a litany of dangers: to public health, to racial purity, to public safety, to political stability, to family values, to economic development, to urbanism itself. Informal residents and their advocates have roundly debunked such critiques, in the process helping to defend their place in Latin America's urban landscape. But shantytown defenders have rarely escaped their critics' conceptual constraints and have often strategically avoided close examination of the neighborhoods' less idyllic features. Arguments over poor communities' elimination have thus become entwined with the language, social categories, and moral polemics of successive generations. Informal cities have frequently occupied center stage in Latin America's sociopolitical arena, but they have largely done so in the service of larger debates about the nature and tolerability of social inequality.

What does it mean when an enduring feature of urban life is persistently defined as a symptom of contemporary crisis? How has this emphasis on immediate conjunctures influenced how Latin America's informal cities are understood and misunderstood, and what can be learned from so many decades of sedimentary debate? This essay considers the problem of presentism in Brazilian and Latin American "slum studies," from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, focusing particularly on the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife. Within this vast literature, I examine three especially important waves of writings: a first in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a second between the 1920s and the early 1940s, and a final "boom" that extended from the 1940s through the early 1970s.

During all of these periods, informal cities remained central to the hemispheric polemics of race, poverty, development, citizenship, revolution, and cultural modernity. Each generation attached shantytowns to its own urgent paradigms, and traces of older templates stubbornly persisted, forming rich and complex intellectual sediment. Yet, until very recently, fundamental questions about the shantytown's origins, functionality, and networks of social and political sustenance remained in an intellectual shadow land, explored mainly when they touched upon seemingly more vital contemporary issues and avoided when they pointed toward politically inconvenient territory. As a result, our historical understanding of this particular form of urban poverty—informal,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822355337
• ISBN 13: 9780822355335
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 302
• Herausgeber: Fischer
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland