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. Until recently, scholars have mainly viewed these settlements through the prisms of crime and drug-related violence, modernization and development theories, populist or revolutionary politics, or debates about the cultures of poverty. Yet shantytowns have proven both more durable and more multifaceted than any of these perspectives foresaw. Far from being accidental offshoots of more dynamic economic and political developments, they are now a permanent and integral part of Latin America's urban societies, critical to struggles over democratization, economic transformation, identity politics, and the drug and arms trades. Integrating historical, cultural, and social scientific methodologies, this collection brings together recent research from across Latin America, from the informal neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Managua and Buenos Aires. Amid alarmist exposÉs, Cities from Scratch intervenes by considering Latin American shantytowns at a new level of interdisciplinary complexity.

Contributors. Javier Auyero, Mariana Cavalcanti, RatÃo Diniz, Emilio Duhau, Sujatha Fernandes, Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Edward Murphy, Dennis Rodgers

“The present compilation is an indispensable work for scholars, students, and those who are generally interested in urban themes for Latin America and, most especially, in matters involving the development and consolidation of informal neighborhoods there. … One of the strengths of this work is to bring together historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, thus allowing for a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue. … It is worth mentioning the compilation’s excellent editing and production, which lend an organic quality to it that respects the diversity of ideas and theoretical options.” - Rafael Soares Gonçalves (Hispanic American Historical Review) "Cities From Scratch is an extremely useful effort, both for the detailed case studies it contains and for the wealth of conceptual and analytic ideas that should provide fuel for much new work." - Henry Dietz (Latin American Politics and Society) "Cities from Scratch provides a timely addition to our understanding of how urbanization and informalization processes play out over time in various Latin American cities." - Janice Perlman (Planning Perspectives)

Brodwyn Fischer is Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro.

Bryan McCann is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is the author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil, both also published by Duke University Press.

Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina, Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition, Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita, all also published by Duke University Press.