Conference Overview  

From Villas Miséria to Colonias Populares: Cities of Poverty in Modern Latin America
June 13, 2008
Northwestern University
Ripton Room, Scott Hall

This workshop will bring an internationally renowned collection of scholars together at Northwestern, in order to examine one of Latin America’s most persistent and misunderstood phenomena: the informal city.   

Since at least the 1940s, shantytowns and other informal settlements have been at the center of debates about poverty and underdevelopment throughout the global south.  In Latin America, they were the places where theories about social marginality and cultures of poverty were most frequently applied or contested, and where fears and hopes associated with communist uprisings and populist cooptation found ample fuel.  Academics and journalists turned their eyes to Latin America’s cities of poverty with these debates in mind, and the resulting wave of studies shaped much of the world’s understanding of urbanization and poverty in mid-20th century Latin America.

  In the decades since this wave hit its peak, Latin America’s shantytowns have grown enormously. Informal settlements now fill the vast majority of Latin America’s urban territory, and the questions of law, environment, governance and culture that arise in relation to these vast expanses of extra-legality are now critical to Latin America’s urban future.  Over the course of the 1990s, in a context where issues of citizenship, violence, and inequality were increasingly at center stage, analysts once again turned to urban shantytowns as critical laboratories of Latin America’s futures, both utopian and dystopian.  In doing so, they both considered new issues – the importance of legal rights and racial dynamics, the environmental dimensions of residential informality, the interconnections between shantytowns and the drug economy – and incorporated new approaches, especially those rooted in cultural and historical analysis.  

Yet, in most cases, these new scholars of Latin American urban poverty have not brought their writings together across national lines. While some have contributed to transnational analyses of the global shantytown phenomenon – some version of Mike Davis’ “Planet of Slums” -- and many have examined the national significance of shantytown settlements, we lack a nuanced picture of the significance of informal cities in Latin America’s distinctive regional dynamic, which has combined democratic opening, economic crisis, structural re-adjustment, migration, environmental transformation and cultural globalization in ways distinct from any other geographical region.   

This workshop seeks to fill this void, assembling a group of scholars and writers who have devoted significant energy to this issue to discuss and debate a collection of working papers, to be subsequently published as an edited volume.  The workshop sessions will be open to the public, and comments on the individual papers will be given by the public.  

The participants from outside Northwestern are diverse in both field and geographical focus, though all are united by a concern with a humanistic (rather than quantitative) approach to issues often treated as pure social science.  They include:  

Brazil: Bryan McCann (history), Mariana Cavalcanti (anthropology), Brodwyn Fischer (history), Paulo Fontes (history)

Mexico: Ann Varley (geography), Emilio Duhau (sociology)

Argentina: Javier Auyero  (sociology), Cristian Alarcón (journalist and essayist)

Chile: Ed Murphy (history)

Colombia: Mary Roldán (history)

Venezuela: Sujatha Fernandes (sociology)

Nicaragua: Dennis Rodgers (anthropology)