This edited collection offers a comprehensive perspective on aspects of urban poverty in the contemporary Latin American city. Building on a long tradition of research beginning with work by Turner, Perlman and Castells, it explores new forms of social exclusion, particularly relating to access to employment, education and other urban goods and services, highlighting the critical and still under-researched link between spatial and other forms of inequality. The introductory chapter gives some brief orientation as to the causes of this new exclusion: the deindustrialisation of cities as part of globalisation and neoliberalisation; the rise of the finance and information sectors, excluding large sectors of the urban population; and a concomitant expansion of informal activities. Alongside older patterns of informal urbanisation and state-built social housing on the Latin American urban periphery, newer elite enclaves and massive middle-income developments exacerbate existing inequalities and exclusion.

In response to this changing panorama, the book offers a snapshot of current research in this area, presenting new analytical tools and emerging debates. It evolved from a 2006 seminar with researchers from a variety of Mexican institutions, including postgraduate students from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, meaning that the 27 chapters present work from both early-career and more established scholars. Chapters by Ziccardi, Duhau, Castillo Berthier and Connolly will interest anyone with a background in the sociology of Latin American cities, while newer researchers present innovative approaches to intractable issues, such as Reygadas’ chapter on ‘Tres matrices generadoras de desigualdades’, and Durand's work on ‘Nueva exclusión social y ciudadanía’. Perhaps because of the book's origins, there is a bias towards case studies from Mexico; however, as the introduction suggests, many of the arguments could be, and in some cases are, extended to other Latin American cities.

Particularly useful in a theoretical sense is the opening section on multidimensional perspectives on urban poverty, which contains four excellent chapters including an analysis of poverty through different economic tendencies (Lomeli) and an argument for a rights-based approach to social exclusion (Dieterlin). The subsequent sections focus on territorial transformation and social exclusion; social and spatial inequality; citizenship and exclusion; and methodological approaches to analysing poverty and inequality. The collection is also useful in its accessible presentation of key urban concepts and debates in Latin America, such as Ramírez Kuri's chapter on public space and Ziccardi's account of historic approaches to urban marginality. In this sense, as well as adding to readers' general understanding of concepts and issues, the book draws on and extends current debates including work on the ‘new marginality’, which suggests that while ‘marginality implied that people were outside the formal institutions that promoted the values and skills of modernity, … social exclusion, in contrast, is basically a second-class citizenship in which disadvantage derives from the differentiation produced by the institutions of the state’ (Bryan Roberts, ‘From Marginality to Social Exclusion: From Laissez Faire to Pervasive Engagement’, Latin American Research Review, 39: 1 (2004), p. 196).

The book's most important contribution lies, therefore, precisely in its interrogation of the debates around old versus new forms of poverty, inequality and exclusion in the urban setting. Through the careful empirical work presented in the research-focused chapters, as well as some of the novel theoretical approaches suggested, a convincing argument is crafted which posits that new global, national and urban forces are shaping the manifestations of poverty, inequality and social exclusion in Latin American cities today. The book's multidisciplinary approach offers diverse entry points for these complex issues, interrogating entrenched theories, such as in Bayón's excellent chapter on the decline of health and education opportunities as a means of social mobility. Similarly, chapters by Duhau and Boils Morales concur that new forms of residential division are replacing and negatively impacting on old models of informal urbanisation as a platform for social mobility. These researchers suggest that urban development today comes with built-in inequality, raising the question as to what level of social fragmentation urban dwellers will tolerate.

While the methodological approaches presented are impressive in their breadth, the lack of figures to illustrate the chapters, with a few exceptions bunched together at the end of the tome, seems an oversight. In particular, the use of photographs (bar the cover image, which is striking but does little to dispel the stereotypical association of informal settlements with urban poverty) is notable by its absence. Related to this, most chapters focus on local cases and populations as their main object of study. While this is hardly surprising in a book on poverty and exclusion, some chapters would have benefited from a broader contextual view relating to the rest of the city: for example, how do middle- and upper-income sectors relate to the lower-income populations which are the main focus of this book? Another useful addition would be a conclusion pulling themes together and reinforcing the logic behind the structure of the book, given the diversity of styles, theoretical approaches and cases.

The editors' stated aim, beyond advancing the field of knowledge, is to offer a resource for civil society and organisations and local government officials. Some sections (such as ‘Indicadores, mediciones y mapas para el análisis de la pobreza, la exclusion y la desigualdad’) succeed in this, despite the overall uneven coverage of particular issues such as youth, institutions and employment at the expense of others such as gender (with Sánchez-Mejorada's chapter a welcome exception). Despite this, the collection will be important reading for anyone involved in analysing and responding to current trends of inequality and marginality, both within Latin America and beyond; and this is especially true given the prescience of some chapters' analysis of deepening tendencies of urban fragmentation in the context of global financial crisis.