The main contribution of this book is to offer different disciplinary approaches and methodologies that illuminate and critique the fundamental contradictions of urban housing, experience, and citizenship in Latin America. The essays address the issue of belonging, place formation, and identity, predominantly from the perspectives of sociology, human geography, anthropology, architecture, and urban studies. The case studies put experience, subjectivity, and residents' agency at the center and avoid essentialist definitions of place.
The book is divided in five parts. The first explores the social construction of urban informality. Bryan Roberts addresses social cohesion as seen by social scientists in two different periods: the first one (1950s–80s) defined by burgeoning urbanization, rural-urban migration, squatter settlements, and official and private attempts to cope with such changes; the second one (from the 1980s on) characterized less by internal migration and more by the suburbanization of poverty and the consolidation of settlements through titling...
