Urban Poverty In Latin America

About half of the region's poor live in cities, and policy makers across Latin America are increasingly interested in policy advice on how to design programmes and policies to tackle poverty. This publication argues that the causes of poverty, the nature of deprivation, and the policy levers to fight poverty are, to a large extent, site specific. It therefore focuses on strategies to assist the urban poor in making the most of the opportunities offered by cities, such as larger labour markets and better services, while helping them cope with the negative aspects, such as higher housing costs, pollution, risk of crime and less social capital.

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

This book deepens the understanding of the broader processes that shape and mediate the responses to climate change of poor urban households and communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Representing an important contribution to the evolution of more effective pro-poor climate change policies in urban areas by local governments, national governments and international organisations, this book is invaluable reading to students and scholars of environment and development studies.

This work originated in a research project for the measurement and analysis of income distribution in the Latin American countries, undertaken jointly by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the World Bank. The present paper presents estimates of the extent of absolute poverty for ten Latin American countries and for the region as a whole in the 1970s, on the basis of available household surveys and population censuses. They are based on country-specific poverty lines representing minimum acceptable levels of private consumption, drawn according to a food-based method. Such poverty lines - ranging from 150 to 250 dollars of annual household consumption per capita - express a normative definition of the absolute dimensions of poverty, partly based on expert appraisals and partly reflecting the actual behavior of low income households facing the life style projected by Latin American development. According to these estimates, 40 percent of Latin American households were poor at the beginning of the 1970s, the incidence of poverty being 26 percent in urban areas and 60 percent in rural areas. Urban poverty extended to more than one-third of urban households in some countries (Brazil, Colombia, Honduras) while affecting between 20 and 30 percent in others (Peru, Mexico, Venezuela), about 15 percent in Costa Rica and Chile and less than 10 percent in Argentina and Uruguay. The extent of poverty in rural areas would not be less than 20 percent in any case and would reach more than 60 percent in some countries. The corresponding poverty gaps were also estimated; in terms of total household income, they may represent manageable proportions (around 2-3 percent) in the better-off countries, but are in the 4-8 percent range in the bigger countries of the region and reach as much as 12 percent in Peru and 17 percent in Honduras.