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A Poverty of Rights examines the history of poor people's citizenship in Rio from the 1920s through the 1960s, the 20th-century period that most critically shaped urban development, social inequality, and the meaning of law and rights in modern Brazil.

A Poverty of Rights examines the history of poor people's citizenship in Rio from the 1920s through the 1960s, the 20th-century period that most critically shaped urban development, social inequality, and the meaning of law and rights in modern Brazil.

"Over a quarter of the world's urban population lives in informal settlements. While informality as a concept has been widely debated, it is still in need of a definitive account, which is what this agenda-setting coedited volume sets out to provide. Arguing that informality was vital to urban development across the globe, the editors and contributors reveal informality as an intrinsic feature of urbanity, capable of illuminating processes of state formation, socioeconomic stratification, and political struggle. The volume brings together cases from Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico), Northern Africa (Morocco and Algiers), and Latin Europe (France, Spain, and Italy) to dispel the notion that urban informality exists only in the Global South. Topics range from attempts to legitimize informal settlements to grassroots efforts to build and save them and the role of racial and ethnic discrimination in their governance. Informal Cities is an indispensable guide to the complex and fraught terrain of urban informality in its many guises"--