Latin American Urbanisation: Informality, Inequalities and Politics
Adrián Lerner
Latin American cities have become symbols of the stark inequalities of the modern era, often exemplified by photographs that show the coexistence of seemingly poor and wealthy neighbourhoods in close proximity. At the core of these representations are notions of formal and informal urbanization, of a city divided in units that are in contact but also discrete. This session will encourage students to question this dichotomy by exploring it at two interrelated levels.
On the one hand, the course will focus on the roots of this idea, its links to other key aspects of Latin American history and society, the intellectual traditions that shape it, and its political implications. On the other hand, the session will also shed light into the everyday actions, perceptions, and strategies of people who experience urban inequality, an all-too-real phenomenon that often carries devastating consequences. A critical approach, based on case studies from Brazil and Argentina, reveals that the Latin American city is fertile ground to investigate the spatial, intellectual, economic, environmental, ethnic, gendered and temporal dimensions of social inequality, as well as the possibilities of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.
Required readings:
- 1. Fischer, Brodwyn. “A Century in the Present Tense: Crisis, Politics, and the Intellectual History of Brazil’s informal Cities” in Cities from Scratch. Poverty and Informality in Latin America, ed. Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014, 9–67.
- 2. Auyero, Javier, and Debora Alejandra Swistun. Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009, 21-61, 82-129.
