Here are 100 books that Favela fans have personally recommended if you like
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I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
No other book has had a greater influence on the ways that planners have tried to create the perfect suburban community, from England to the United States, Finland to France, Brazil to Australia.
Howard published his ideas about how to create humane suburbs more than 120 years ago with the future of London in mind, but they still resonate around the globe. Google “new towns” and the hits may be overwhelming. That’s testimony to the power of a good idea.
By the way, if you live in Columbia, Maryland or Irvine, California, you’re living in a version of “Howardville.”
I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
Is a picture worth a thousand words? Urbanist Dolores Hayden sure thinks so, providing a cheeky, even snarky, guide to the worst aspects of the contemporary suburban landscape.
Brightly lit aerial photographs (many are from the American Southwest) show big box interchanges, lollipop subdivisions, tower farms for the electronic world, and all the other ways in which sprawl chews up the American land. Leaf through the pages, then you get to choose: Do you weep or do you scream in outrage?
A Field Guide to Sprawl was selected by the urban web site Planetizen for its list of "Top Ten Books in Urban Studies" and by Discover magazine for its list of "Top 20 Books in Science." Features on the book appeared in The New York Times and the Boston Globe.
Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define.…
I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
American suburbs are all tidy middle-class places like where I grew up, right? Wrong.
Do-it-yourself housing and shantytowns were never confined to the developing world. The fringes of Toronto and Cleveland and Los Angeles could look a lot like the fringes of Sao Paolo or Istanbul in the first half of the twentieth century.
My Blue Heaven is a revelation about DIY community building on the south side of Los Angeles at the same time high-end developers were creating Pasadena and Beverly Hills.
In the 1920s, thousands of white migrants settled in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. Six miles from down-town and adjacent to Watts, South Gate and its neighboring communities served as L.A.'s Detroit, an industrial belt for mass production of cars, tires, steel, and other durable goods. Blue-collar workers built the suburb literally from the ground up, using sweat equity rather than cash to construct their own homes. As Becky M. Nicolaides shows in My Blue Heaven, this ethic of self-reliance and homeownership formed the core of South Gate's identity. With post-World War II economic prosperity, the community's emphasis…
I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods.
Every country has its own way of naming its suburbs, and often more than one way. Do-it-yourself settlements in the desert around Lima, Peru were barriadas until the government decided that pueblos jovenes or “young towns” sounds better.
Turkish gecekondu for new neighborhoods translates as “built over night.” The bidonvilles of North Africa are literally “tin can towns.” I won’t kid you, the chapters are written by academics, but they take you on a tour of improvised settlements around the world.
'Borgata', 'favela', 'periurbain', and 'suburb' are but a few of the different terms used throughout the world that refer specifically to communities that develop on the periphery of urban centres. In What's in a Name? editors Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms have gathered together experts from around the world in order to provide a truly global framework for the study of the urban periphery. Rather than view these distinct communities through the lens of the western notion of urban sprawl, the contributors focus on the variety of everyday terms that are used, together with their connotations. This volume explores the…
When I was twelve, my family moved to Brazil for a year because of my father’s work. I’ve been fascinated by the country and it has been always been the focal point of my research. Initially, my focus was how neighborhood associations in Rio’s favelas took advantage of new political opportunities during the transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s, however, the neighborhoods had all been occupied by heavily armed and occasionally violent drug gangs. Since then, I've tried to figure out the dynamics of this process, from the involved actors’ points of view. Including the voices of participants in drug gang life and those, like Bruno, who bring drugs to market.
If you want to get a taste of what life is like in a Rio favela, then this is the book for you. Based on years of meticulous fieldwork, Goldstein documents the hardships endured by a woman she befriended who works as a maid for a wealthy family in the city. More importantly, however, Goldstein’s book describes in detail how life in a Rio favela changed as violence associated with the drug trade overwhelms the community. When she began her fieldwork, in the early 1990s, Rio was enjoying a period of relative calm. By the end of the 90s, however, Goldstein could no longer risk visiting her friends for fear of her own personal safety.
Donna M. Goldstein presents a hard-hitting critique of urban poverty and violence and challenges much of what we think we know about the "culture of poverty" in this compelling read. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro, who cope with unbearable suffering, violence and social abandonment. The book offers a clear-eyed view of socially conditioned misery while focusing on the creative responses - absurdist and black humor - that people generate amid daily conditions of humiliation,…
I grew up in Tanzania, where I discovered the importance of learning first-hand from ordinary people about their lives by accompanying my mother, who was an anthropologist, when she carried out participant observation among coastal people. Much later in my own research, I could see how essential it was to interact with people face-to-face and learn about their aspirations, joys, fears, daily struggles, and creative ways of coping with the challenges of an economy in free fall. I learned to look beyond the “economic data” to more fully appreciate the humanity of the people involved. All of these books I selected are by people who learned about the real urban economy in this way.
Drawing on her first-hand experience of living in a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Perlman powerfully upends many existing myths about the urban poor as marginal in this classic work.
This book, which inspired me to look beyond the economic models at how people actually live, shows how shantytown dwellers are integrated into society, but in a way that exploits and oppresses them economically and politically.
They are not socially and culturally marginal, but rather they are stigmatized and excluded from a closed social system that is radically unequal.
They are socially well-organized and cohesive; they aspire to educate their children and improve the quality of their homes; they work hard and take pride in a job well done. They are aware of and involved in those aspects of politics that affect their lives.
Two weeks before qualifying for his 30-year pension benefits, my father lost his job. This corporate reduction in labor force introduced a debilitating shame to the displaced breadwinner and a new level of precarity to a family with 3 of 4 kids in college. It also shattered the myth that capitalism rewarded individual initiative and hard work. Understanding inequities and the manifold structural forces that can determine an individual’s life prospects became a focal point of my graduate studies and my four decades of university teaching. Using race, gender, and sexuality as analytical tools, my research enriched traditional approaches to political economy.
As economic inequality has grown exponentially over the past five decades, some of the dispossessed have rebelled.
Focusing on mobilizations in Brazil, Mexico, and Salvador, Gledhill demonstrates how struggles for social justice are transformed into “threats” to national security, which require “securitization” measures. Through intricate ethnographies, the book documents the deployment of the police, military, and paramilitary to quell domestic disputes.
Protests by students, laborers, migrants, Indigenous, the poor, environmentalists, and human rights activists are subjected to police “pacification” involving state violence, criminalization, incarceration, and sometimes death.
Situating securitization in the context of transnational and global relations generated by capitalist uneven development, Gledhill argues that the logic of capitalist accumulation in the current era is inseparable from repressive violence against “inconvenient” populations.
When viewed from the perspective of those who suffer the consequences of repressive approaches to public security, it is often difficult to distinguish state agents from criminals. The mistreatment by police and soldiers examined in this book reflects a new kind of stigmatization.
The New War on the Poor links the experiences of labour migrants crossing Latin America's international borders, indigenous Mexicans defending their territories against capitalist mega-projects, drug wars and paramilitary violence, Afro-Brazilians living on the urban periphery of Salvador, and farmers and business people tired of paying protection to criminal mafias. John Gledhill looks at how and why…
Born in 1969 as the seventh of eight children to two Harlem-raised parents, I benefited from both the inner-city life of Queens, New York and childhood summers spent on a farm in rural upstate New York. Academic, professional, and physical accomplishments have punctuated my life. An adventurer by nature, I became the first African American to hike to the top of every mountain in the northeast US over 4,000' (115 of them) by September of 2000. At that time, less than 400 people had accomplished this feat; whereas thousands have scaled Mount Everest. My home city’s iconic landmarks create a psychological veil that blinds people to the vast open spaces that dominate New York State.
Divergent, yet shockingly similar, life experiences are chronicled in Greenville and my own book. A poor white family from Long Island with eight children sent one son to live and work on a farm in the Catskill region during the 1950s. Harsh living conditions downstate with an alcoholic father and abusive mother were replaced upstate with a loving uncle, welcoming peers, and athletic success. Circumstances changed again dramatically, and the author tidies up the chaos that was his father’s life by visiting the farm 45 years later.
Inspired by a troubled family history, this “book of grace and dignity . . . will be around for a long, long time” (Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin).
In this “terrific” novel, award-winning author Dale Peck recounts the childhood of his father, Dale Peck Sr. (Jonathan Safran Foer). Raised in poverty with seven brothers and sisters in suburban Long Island, terrorized by an abusive mother, Dale Sr.’s life changes when his alcoholic father dumps him at his uncle’s dairy farm in upstate New York. There, he begins to thrive, finding real love and connection with his…
Robin Attfield and Barry Wilkins are retired members of the Philosophy staff of Cardiff University, where they individually and jointly taught undergraduate courses in Philosophy and History of Ideas, and magistral courses in Social Ethics. They also supervised doctoral students in fields including development ethics; former students of theirs hold professorships in places ranging from Los Angeles to Addis Ababa and to Jahangirnagar (Bangladesh). Robin Attfield is currently completing his twentieth published book; several of his books have concerned our international responsibilities. From 1990 they became aware of a serious gap in the philosophical literature with regard to international development, and managed through their joint book to begin plugging it.
Robin loves the way that this book displays how even a Kantian basis (not home territory for him) shows why poverty should not be tolerated.
It underlines how extreme poverty undermines the exercise of rational agency, and thus the proper functioning of human beings.
Onora O’Neill argues cogently that morality precludes the employment of force or fraud, and gives rise to universal principles applicable both within and between societies. Population policies, for example, should depend on the informed consent of those affected.
I’ve always loved technology. I like the constant change, the sense of creativity and invention, of how it can act as an incredible force for good and human progress and betterment in the world. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t tinkering with gadgets—taking radios apart to mend them or learn how they worked; designing electronic circuits for music synthesis; programming computers. But I’ve also always been interested in politics and the complex intersection of technology and public policy. So much so that most of my working life has been spent at this intersection, which is why I love these books—and hope you will too.
Virginia Eubanks writes in an incredibly immersive and engaging style, making her book as compulsive as a work of fiction—and equally hard to put down. It exposes the deeply toxic consequences of the way automated decision-making increasingly dominates our public institutions, creating a sort of “twenty-first century digital poorhouse”.
This automated inequality denies citizens their humanity and any sense of agency, condemning them to the sort of negative moral judgments and cycle of decline and despair that would have been familiar to Charles Dickens in his day.
In Indiana, one million people lose their healthcare, food stamps, and cash benefits in three years-because a new computer system interprets any application mistake as "failure to cooperate." In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for a shrinking pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.
Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change.…
