Divisions among the urban poor prevent them from banding together in pursuit of their objective interests. This, in a nutshell, is the larger, provocative argument of this important book. Mobilising a diverse set of conceptual tools – ranging from democratic theory to social movement scholarship – and drawing upon a multi-method approach that combines qualitative and quantitative data production techniques, Gabriela Ippolito-O'Donnell reconstructs the cycle of popular contention in the city of Buenos Aires from 1983 until the early 2000s. The book focuses on the case of the Comisión de Vecinos de Villa Lugano (Villa Lugano Neighbours' Committee, CVL), a neighbourhood association that, in more than one way, encapsulates the predicament of many an urban social movement that fights for its ‘rights to the city’ in the global South. The book locates the CVL's collective struggles in the dual context of an increasingly divided city, and of a larger cycle of contention that began when democratic rule returned to Argentina in 1983, in order to understand and explain the dynamics of popular contention in the poorest area of Buenos Aires.

The author takes us back in history to the mid-nineteenth century in order to examine changing forms of popular protest, but most of the action (in both empirical and theoretical terms) takes place as one neighbourhood organisation (the CVL) spearheads neighbourhood mobilisation at one time (the early 1980s) and one place (one specific area of Villa Lugano). As residents begin to make claims on the newly inaugurated city authorities, demanding street paving, the author – who has been conducting research in the area since that moment – shows the interplay between political opportunities, mobilising networks, and joint organising and framing efforts that were at the root of a very effective form of collective action. I emphasise ‘one specific area’ of the neighbourhood because the author's is a spatially based argument about the increase and decline of contention. The author shows how, together with shifting political opportunities, the CVL's own attempts to expand its demands (seeking, for example, better health services for the entire neighbourhood) and its constituency (reaching other, poorer, stigmatised areas within Villa Lugano) ended up feeding and multiplying the internal divisions that, in turn, determined the fate of the organisation.

For the past two decades geographers and social theorists have been making calls to incorporate ‘space’ into our understandings and explanations of social phenomena. Space has been ‘reasserted’ in contemporary social theory and analysis, to the extent that, by now, the mutual imbrications between the social and the spatial, and the causal effecticity of the latter, are widely accepted. Social movement scholars have followed this trend, and have slowly begun to incorporate space and place in their understandings and explanations of collective action. Ippolito-O'Donnell draws upon a strand of this literature to make a very interesting and provocative argument: long-lasting spatial and symbolic divisions between areas of the neighbourhood (the older area, populated mostly by descendants of migrants from overseas, and the newer areas, housing projects and shanty towns populated by highly stigmatised poor and migrants from bordering countries) become insurmountable obstacles to collective action. In other words, the poor are internally divided – shanty town dwellers vs. neighbourhood residents, nationals vs. non-nationals, folks who are ‘manipulated by clientelist politics’ vs. those who are not – and these divisions cripple their joint efforts to claim their share of justice and equality.

The book argues that, together with shifting political opportunities and increasing social hostilities, the strengthening of clientelist politics had a negative effect on the possibilities of poor people's organisation and mobilisation. Although there is a clear description of the changes at the state level and of the ways in which they impact local politics, the evidence on the intensification of patronage politics in the city is not very strong (and the author reproduces a dichotomy, clientelism vs. collective action, that recent literature has put into question). Given how central a role ‘social hostility’ among the urban poor plays in the author's argument, this reader finished the book craving a deeper analysis of the ways in which animosities and stigmas play out in neighbourhood politics in real time and space; most of her material about hostility stems from interviews and one is left to wonder how, for example, opinions about Villeros translate into concrete political practice.

Although The Right to the City was published in 2012, most of the data and analysis is confined to the 1980s and 1990s. The book could have included empirical material on the highly contentious 2000s, during which social movement organisations were, for a time, successful in bridging the social hostilities that the author so well describes. Criticisms aside, the book is clearly argued and well written in jargon-free prose, and it will be of use not only to those interested in urban movements but also to those seeking a general text on urban politics in Argentina.