Favela by Janice Perlman
A billion people, roughly half of all city dwellers in the developing world, live in squatter settlements. The most famous of these settlements are the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, which have existed for more than half a century and continue to outpace the rest of the city in growth. Janice Perlman's award-winning The Myth of Marginality was the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, and it is considered one of the most important books in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she had first met in 1969--as well as their children and grandchildren--Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life. Perlman discovers that much has changed in three decades, but while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel marginalized more than ever. The greatest change is the explosion of drug and arms trade and the high incidence of fatal violence that has resulted. Almost one in five people report that a member of their family has been a victim of homicide. Yet the greatest challenge of all is job creation--decent work for decent pay. If unemployment and under-paid employment are not addressed, she argues, all other efforts--from housing to policing to community development--will fail to resolve the fundamental issues. A revealing study of the giant slums of Rio de Janeiro and of the vibrant communities of migrants who have risked everything to come to the city to provide more opportunities for their children, this book yields insights that apply to the entire global South, from Mexico City to Cairo, and from Mumbai to Lagos. Favela offers a powerful, long-term look at one of the great challenges facing the modern world--perhaps the major challenge of the twenty-first century.
This book deserves its broad public receptionNo work on informal settlements can compare with the longitudinal breadth of Favela, and in this respect the work is an invaluable achievement. * Alessandro Angelini, CUNY Graduate Center, Social Forces Journal *
a valuable and vivid study of life as it has been lived by the poor in one of Latin America's biggest cities. * Michael Reid, Times Literary Supplement *
in the late 1960s ... Ms Perlman and her team completed a study of 750 people. The book that came out of this, The Myth of Marginality (1976), argued that far from being a cancerous growth that was harming the city, favela dwellers actually kept the place going, by doing all of the low-income jobs that a city needs to get done. Earlier this decade Ms Perlman went back and tried to track down as many of the original participants as she could, to see how they had fared. She managed to find just over 40% of the original study group Her findings were surprising. More than half of the original study group had moved out of the favelas, suggesting they are not the dead-end that many people suppose. In general, Ms Perlman finds far more social mobility than the reams of favela studies would suggest. * Muchacho Fermier, The Economist *
a valuable and vivid study of life as it has been lived by the poor in one of Latin America's biggest cities. * Michael Reid, Times Literary Supplement *
in the late 1960s ... Ms Perlman and her team completed a study of 750 people. The book that came out of this, The Myth of Marginality (1976), argued that far from being a cancerous growth that was harming the city, favela dwellers actually kept the place going, by doing all of the low-income jobs that a city needs to get done. Earlier this decade Ms Perlman went back and tried to track down as many of the original participants as she could, to see how they had fared. She managed to find just over 40% of the original study group Her findings were surprising. More than half of the original study group had moved out of the favelas, suggesting they are not the dead-end that many people suppose. In general, Ms Perlman finds far more social mobility than the reams of favela studies would suggest. * Muchacho Fermier, The Economist *
Janice Perlman is President and Founder of the Mega-Cities Project. Winner of a Guggenheim Award, she has been Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of California-Berkeley, Visiting Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Columbia University, and a Senior Research Scholar at New York University. She lives in Nyack, New York.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780195368369 |
| ISBN 10 | 0195368363 |
| Title | Favela |
| Author | Janice Perlman |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc |
| Year published | 2010-06-03 |
| Number of pages | 448 |
| Prizes | Winner of PROSE (Sociology & Socal Work) 2010 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |