Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America

The present compilation is an indispensable work for scholars, students, and those who are generally interested in urban themes for Latin America and, most especially, in matters involving the development and consolidation of informal neighborhoods there. In this set of eight essays, in addition to a fine series of pictures of Rio de Janeiro's slums, the authors revisit different mainland cities, including Managua, Santiago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Rio de Janeiro. The book focuses particularly on the last city, whose slums' peculiarities are the subject of three essays.

One of the strengths of this work is to bring together historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, thus allowing for a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. Providing a dense bibliographic survey, the essays discuss an assortment of issues, such as the real estate market, urban violence, the theory of marginality, forms of political mobilization, and urban...