In recent years, a gulf appears to have developed between academic writing and the ‘developmental’ literature. World Bank staff members usually cite only their own institution's publications, although the occasional exception is made for the work of academic economists. In turn, academic writing too often ignores policy debates to pursue its own issues – the term ‘ivory tower’, it seems, is an increasingly appropriate description of much of the social science work conducted in universities. One of the causes of this mutual neglect is that so much is written, not just by academics and the multilateral development banks, but increasingly by journalists, NGOs and bloggers. The flood of writing means that absolutely no one can keep up, and in response we tend to read too narrowly.
This problem has clearly infected this book, for while there is an extensive bibliography, huge areas of academic work on poverty, slums, informality and urban upgrading are omitted and there is an almost total absence of references to ‘developmental work’. For example, there is only one reference to any work done by the World Bank or the Inter-American Development Bank despite their ubiquitous presence in the region's cities.
The authors state that ‘[t]he volume's central questions are about the nature of Latin America's poor informal cities themselves: their relationships to the larger urban form, their political roles, their transformations over time, and their nature as sites for the reproduction or transcendence of poverty and subcitizenship’ (p. 6). The formulation of these questions perhaps explains the absence of any reference to the development literature, but it also constitutes what to my mind is the main flaw of this book: its failure to come up with any kind of policy recommendation. In that sense, this is a modern academic study par excellence; it reviews the path of academic enquiry, sets up new areas of supposed neglect, and then proceeds to assume that the designated issue is important. But for a book subtitled Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America, is that sufficient?
The blurb claims that ‘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’. This claim only makes sense if, as it does, it omits so much of the work that has already been carried out in the study of these phenomena.
This criticism is not to say that the book does not have merit. Bryan McCann's chapter about the relationships over time between a favela and its middle-class neighbours is interesting in revealing the pronounced social divide that exists between them. Even the famous Favela-Bairro Program failed ‘to integrate the favela with the surrounding formal neighbourhood’ (p. 119). McCann's description of the effects of the urban pacification programme is also interesting, although I am somewhat puzzled by his claim that the programme has ‘triggered rampant real-estate speculation within Zona Sul favelas’ (p. 122). How can that be, when legal titles are still absent and middle-class alienation from the neighbouring favela is so marked (p. 124)? Mariana Cavalcanti's chapter deals with a closely related theme and argues that the proximity of a favela to the asfalto of the middle class sometimes creates a threshold area where property values become more equal. However, the cause of this is troubling insofar as it arises as much through the falling values of formal property ‘as a function of its proximity to favelas’ (p. 211) as through the ‘unrelenting valuation of properties in consolidated favelas’. Again, I am not wholly convinced that the value of favela property can have risen so much, and neither Cavalcanti nor McCann present any real evidence to support this assertion. In addition, Cavalcanti's interesting description of how formal estate agents attempting to sell property to middle-class households do not just ‘avoid talking about it [the proximity of favelas]; they avoid dealing with it altogether’ (p. 228) casts doubt on how much the price of favela housing can rise – for if the middle classes are so scared of the favelas and try to move away, what is fuelling the rising property boom in the favelas?
As with any edited collection, this volume has limitations in terms of its coverage. Four of the nine chapters are about Rio de Janeiro, which prompts the question of whether Rio was the most studied city of the South even before it won the rights to host the Olympics and the final of the World Cup. The other five chapters deal with some aspect of informality in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Managua, Mexico City and Santiago. Some of these are original contributions and point to ethnographic approaches that could be useful to other social scientists.
In sum, this book is clearly a useful contribution to the urban literature in Latin America, but one that falls short of the rather ambitious claims of its editors; neither does it provide much help to policy-makers.
