Housing and Belonging in Latin America

The main contribution of this book is to offer different disciplinary approaches and methodologies that illuminate and critique the fundamental contradictions of urban housing, experience, and citizenship in Latin America. The essays address the issue of belonging, place formation, and identity, predominantly from the perspectives of sociology, human geography, anthropology, architecture, and urban studies. The case studies put experience, subjectivity, and residents' agency at the center and avoid essentialist definitions of place.The book is divided in five parts. The first explores the social construction of urban informality. Bryan Roberts addresses social cohesion as seen by social scientists in two different periods: the first one (1950s–80s) defined by burgeoning urbanization, rural-urban migration, squatter settlements, and official and private attempts to cope with such changes; the second one (from the 1980s on) characterized less by internal migration and more by the suburbanization of poverty and the consolidation of settlements through titling and the provision of urban infrastructure. Mobility, social heterogeneity, and poverty are common throughout both periods, but Roberts points out that representations of urban disorganization have shifted from social anxieties about rural migrants in the first period to fears about gang crime, drug trafficking, and general violence (leading to the explosion of gated communities) in the second. Gerard Martin and Marijke Martin look into Medellín's “social urbanism” reform movement (a global paradigm of good urban governance) to speak more broadly about the transformation of “informal dweller-builders” into “citizen-builders and citizen-clients” (p. 70). This case shows that urban policies are central in improving quality of life and advancing a sense of dignity and empowerment. Still, violence and general distrust speak to the fragmented experience of urban dwellers.In the second part, longitudinal studies (as Janice Perlman showed in her book Favela [2010]) are key to tracking changing strategies and sentiments among families regarding their homes. The essay by Michaela Hordijk refers to the importance that the first generation of squatter settlers gave to collective action, in contrast with the more individualistic interests and general skepticism of the second or third generation, whose concern is to secure homeownership. Likewise, as Erika Grajeda notes, negotiations about inheritance, succession, and living arrangements remind us that regularization of property titles creates new forms of illegality. Internal differentiation also occurred within slums. As the case of the Morro Santa Marta favela in Rio, discussed by Palloma Menezes, exemplifies, sentiments of belonging among the residents differ according to their location and access to urban improvements.The third part focuses on middle-class urban environments and lifestyles. The essay by Jan Dohnke and Corinna Hölzl focuses on luxurious gated high-rise apartment buildings and the marketing strategies that sell exclusive and class-segregated lifestyles in Buenos Aires, a city whose uniform urban grid, paradoxically, sought to create social inclusion. The Casas GEO corporation sold Mexico attainable middle-class ways of life (as well as furniture and decor) via housing complexes. Unsurprisingly, the houses were of poor quality and far from the dreams of middle-class comfort and security analyzed incisively by Cristina Inclán-Valadez. Incongruences, as Fernando Ostuni and Jean-Louis Van Gelder show, can also be found in federal housing programs that dedicated massive funds to social dwelling (after decades of failed neoliberal policies) while the number of informal settlements kept increasing, as happened recently in Buenos Aires.The fourth part treats architecture, design, and residents' representations processually. Fernando Luiz Lara sagaciously shows how modernism became the architectural unconscious of most residents who built their own modernist homes. Here modernism, more than an aesthetic language, connotes experience and technological expertise. For Peter Kellett, the house is not a finished product but a lifelong project that encodes social meanings and practices whereby the urban poor are guided by their desired futures to design and decorate their places. Jota (José) Samper and Tamera Marko delve into their oral history archive project “Medellín mi hogar” to explore competing representations of Medellín by the state and residents.The book ends with two essays that reflect on the meanings ascribed to home by low-income residents. Ann Varley argues that dwelling provides a basis of material support, a sense of safety and individuation. In Peru, as Arij Ouweneel shows, a collective of young individuals draw on pre-Hispanic Andean notions of space to make sense of their communities. If cities are experienced in a fragmented way, then urban studies should be, according to Ouweneel, neighborhood studies.As with any volume that gathers 13 essays in different stages of elaboration, the challenge for the editors is to lend coherence to the book as a collection. Christien Klaufus's introduction does an admirable job of framing the main themes. The question is, perhaps, what is Latin American about these common experiences, which speak about the realities of cities in a global world that produces more urbanites and forms of marginality. This book reminds us that while urban residents (rich or poor) will always ascribe particular forms of identity to their homes and places and assert their right to the city, housing should be at the center of any project that seeks to dignify human life

Economic growth · Geography · Human settlement · Political science · Poverty · Sociology · Urbanism · Urbanization · Architecture · Latin American Urban Studies · Law