Cities From Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America

by Brodwyn Fischer

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822355335
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 11.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

CITIES FROM SCRATCH

POVERTY AND INFORMALITY IN URBAN LATIN AMERICA

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By BRODWYN FISCHER, Bryan McCann, JAVIER AUYERO

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5518-2

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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, often precarious, bereft of most "public" services, yet defining and facilitating urban life for the region's poorest people—remains weak. For most places, at most times, we still do not know how poor informal cities came into being, what range of ties bound them to their urban contexts, what allowed them to persist over successive generations, or what their presence has done to transform Latin American or Brazilian urbanity. In tracing what was learned and lost through nearly a century of study in the present tense, I hope to highlight the potential of alternate intellectual paths and also to identify the polemical magnets that threaten to distort contemporary understandings of the settlements that Mike Davis so correctly identified as bellwethers of Latin America's urban future.

WHICH CAME FIRST, THE INFORMAL OR THE CITY?

Latin America's poor, informal cities existed long before they were named. While modern-day definitions of Latin America's underprivileged and peripheral neighborhoods vary, they tend to converge on a few basic features: illegal or semilegal land-tenure arrangements, substandard construction, lack of formal urban planning, a mostly poor and nonwhite population, and little or no access to public goods and services. By these criteria, all kinds of colonial and nineteenth-century urban settlements could have been called "informal slums," had they been unusual enough to merit a label. Spanish America has often been distinguished from Brazil because of its relatively orderly city planning, but even there urban regulation was quite circumscribed: borders blurred between urban centers and rural settlements, and it was often taken for granted that the poor (and especially the indigenous poor) would live in "informal" neighborhoods distant from the city squares. Richard Morse dated such phenomena in Mexico to the sixteenth century, citing George Kubler's description of "indian districts comprised of casual, dense agglomerations of huts." Asael Hansen described analogous social geographies for colonial Mérida, and Morse also cited an eighteenth-century shantytown populated by two thousand castas (persons of mixed race) near Callao's central square, dispersed with a resettlement policy eerily similar to those pursued throughout Latin America in the twentieth century. Such references confirm what common sense suggests: in Latin America's colonial cities, as in modern ones, "urbanized" regions coexisted with rustic and improvised dwellings, which were often accepted as the inevitable result of poverty or necessity and merited mention only when they became dense or central enough to disrupt the urban core.

Well into the nineteenth century, when Latin American social thinkers had already begun to problematize urban poverty and to equate urbanism and progress, poor people's improvised huts were only very rarely distinguished from the general landscape of urban indigence. Even a keen polemicist such as the Colombian liberal Miguel Samper—who in 1867 tied a blistering description of Bogotá's urban dysfunction and promiscuous poverty to a wide-ranging condemnation of colonialism, political chaos, and Colombian national backwardness—saw no reason to single out informal dwellings as a particular ill. Neither did Juan Capelo, who explored the links between urban form and social evolution in his pioneering Sociologia de Lima (1895). Although early censuses often suggest the ubiquity of improvised housing and scarce urban services, the many guides that chronicled Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scarcely mention them. William Eleroy Curtis's The Capitals of Spanish America (1888) contained evocative sketches of shacks and improvised neighborhoods in Caracas, Guayaquil, and Rio, but such places appeared nowhere in Curtis's text. Curtis did describe a good part of Lima's housing stock as "mere shacks of bamboo reeds, lashed together by thongs of rawhide, and plastered within and without with thick layers of mud." In Valparaíso, he wrote, "there are whole blocks ... in which nothing but corrugatediron houses can be seen, both roof and walls being of the same material." And yet these places merited no specific terminology; they were simply an expected feature of the "primitive" Latin American cityscape.

Interestingly, some of the most explicit early references to informal dwellings come from belle epoque Buenos Aires—already the most European and formalized of Latin American capitals. James Scobie uncovered numerous late nineteenth-century photographs of shanties and huts in the ecologically precarious outskirts that would become Buenos Aires's "black belt"; these were also cited in an 1896 article about the area published in the Revista Municipal. The French prime minister Georges Clemenceau's South America To-day (1911) disgustedly compared Buenos Aires's improvised slums to similarly degraded areas of Paris. It is perhaps their very scarcity that made the slums notable; Clemenceau's enraptured portrait of Rio de Janeiro made no mention of the favelas that already occupied most of the city's downtown hills, perhaps because he found them a more "natural" component of Brazil's rustic urban scene.

THE INVENTION OF A PROBLEM

In light of so many centuries of urban informality, an obvious question emerges. Why, sometime between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did Latin America's informal dwellings begin to be named, photographed, and conceived of as a discrete problem? The specific histories are unclear for most places, and one suspects they are as varied as the terms that emerged to describe the settlements: colonias populares or proletárias in Mexico, tugurios in Colombia, barriadas in Peru, callampas in Chile, ranchos in Venezuela, and favelas in Brazil. There is every indication that some of the explanation boils down to the concurrence of ascendant urbanism and quick informal expansion. But writings from the early twentieth century about Brazil's favelas and mocambos (shacks) suggest that the terms were invented not so much to describe the places where poor people lived as to spell out the relationship between such places and their surrounding cities. While shacks and small informal communities had existed for centuries, their emergence as a category of urban pathology largely depended on Brazil's integration into international debates about poverty, sanitation, racial degeneracy, and urbanism.

In order to understand the slums' invention it is necessary to reconstruct what we can of their literal expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was typically a practical matter, and it satisfied multiple and conflicting interests. In Recife and Rio de Janeiro, both isolated barracos (huts) and small groupings thereof were common throughout the nineteenth century, associated mainly with slaves, libertos (freed persons), and the free poor. Gilberto Freyre wrote of "the villages of shacks, huts, or shanties that grew up in the cities under the Empire," surmising that such settlements "represented the desire on the part of free Negroes or runaway slaves to revive African styles of living or association." In subsequent writings, Freyre emphasized African etymology of the word mocambo (the northeastern term for a rustic shack) and emphasized the link between mocambos and freedom among liberated slaves. In Rio, some informal settlements seem also to have emerged from the process of freedom, either as small "abolitionist quilombos" (maroons) housing runaway slaves or as backyard shacks "given" or rented to ex-slaves or other dependents.

More prosaically, Recife's mocambos multiplied during economic downturns or urban population crises such as the great drought of 1877–79. Rio's shacks proliferated in periods of urban reform and sanitary crackdown, when the razing of inner-city tenements left thousands homeless, or when military mobilizations involved larger numbers of soldiers than the barracks could handle. There was, everywhere, ample evidence of profiteering: a poor worker could squat on a small piece of land and rent out part of it, a widow would allow a family to build a hut in exchange for petty services or a small fee, tenement managers often encouraged "beehives" of improvised dwellings to expand well beyond their property lines, exalted members of high society extracted rent from lands tied up in judicial conflict.

Political expediency could also spur informal settlement. By the mid-1880s, Rio's municipal council had resolved to allow some shacks on the centrally located Morro de Santo Antônio, and one illiterate supplicant appealed to the minister of the Brazilian empire for permission to construct a "barraca" from scrap wood on the hill "as others have been allowed to do." Ten years later, officials gave homeless soldiers leave to build shacks on Santo Antônio in the wake of the Revolta da Armada (Navy Revolt); around the same time, when public-health officials destroyed a massive tenement at the foot of Rio's Providência Hill, they allowed the slum's owners to rent adjacent hillside land to evicted tenants, who apparently built their homes with scrap from the destruction. Five years later, soldiers returning from Brazil's famous Canudos conflict swelled Providência's shacktown, dubbing it the morro da favella (favela hill) after a northeastern desert plant. When Rio implemented a sweeping building code in 1903, a clause allowing hillside shacks provided a residential escape valve. The morros were a cheap alternative, too, for poor residents swept from their homes by Rio's massive twentieth-century urban reforms. Rio's shantytowns thus served as places of refuge, as emergency shelter, or as sources of private profit. But they were also a steam valve, a way for politicians to ease social tension and reap political capital by protecting poor populations from laws and policies that fit crudely with the city's material, social, and cultural realities. In Recife, considerably less evidence exists for this period, but similar political expediencies were noted in the 1930s, and repeated statutes banning the mocambos were routinely ignored, suggesting an analogous phenomenon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from CITIES FROM SCRATCH by BRODWYN FISCHER, Bryan McCann, JAVIER AUYERO. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction / Brodwyn Fischer 1

1. A Century in the Present Tense: Crisis,Politics, and the Intellectual History of Brazil's Informal Cities / Brodwyn Fischer 9

2. In and Out of the Margins: Urban Land Seizures and Homeownership in Santiago, Chile / Edward Murphy 68

3. Troubled Oasis: The Intertwining Histories of the Morro dos Cabritos and Bairro Peixoto / Bryan McCann 102

4. Compadres, Vecinos, and Bróderes in the Barrio: Kinship, Politics, and Local Territorialization in Urban Nicaragua / Dennis Rodgers 127

5. The Informal City: An Enduring Slum or a Progressive Habitat? / Emilio Duhau 150

6. The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro / Ratão Diniz (with captions by Bryan McCann) 170

7. Informal Cities and Community-Based Organizing: The Case of the Teatro Alameda / Sujatha Fernandes 185

8. Threshold Markets: The Production of Real-Estate Value between the "Favela" and the "Pavement" / Mariana Cavalcanti 208

9. Toxic Wasting: Flammable Shantytown Revisited / Javier Auyero 238

Bibliography 263

Contributors 285

Index 287

What People are Saying About This

The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake - Mark A. Healey

"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."

Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 - Jose C. Moya

"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."

From the Publisher

"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 A. Healey, author of The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake

Editorial Reviews

"Cities from Scratch provides a timely addition to our understanding of how urbanization and informalization processes play out over time in various Latin American cities."

Janice Perlman Perspectives

"Cities from Scratch provides a timely addition to our understanding of how urbanization and informalization processes play out over time in various Latin American cities."

Planning Perspectives - Janice Perlman

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. … One of the strengths of this work is to bring together historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, thus allowing for a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. … It is worth mentioning the compilation’s excellent editing and production, which lend an organic quality to it that respects the diversity of ideas and theoretical options.

Hispanic American Historical Review - Rafael Soares Gonçalves

"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

From the Publisher

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. … One of the strengths of this work is to bring together historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, thus allowing for a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. … It is worth mentioning the compilation’s excellent editing and production, which lend an organic quality to it that respects the diversity of ideas and theoretical options.

Hispanic American Historical Review - Rafael Soares Gonçalves

"Cities From Scratch is an extremely useful effort, both for the detailed case studies it contains and for the wealth of conceptual and analytic ideas that should provide fuel for much new work."

Latin American Politics and Society - Henry Dietz

"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."

The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism and the Remaking of San Juan after the 1944 Earthquake - Mark A. Healey

"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."

Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 - Jose C. Moya