A Study of Life in Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro by Janice Perlman

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In Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, Janice Perlman provides a substantial study of life in the 1,020 favelas in Rio de Janeiro. She attempts to relocate and reinterview her previous subjects. Perlman returned to the infamous slums of Rio de Janeiro to follow four generations over 40 years. She has interviewed almost 2,500 people including her subjects’ children and grandchildren. She blends detailed personal testimonies with insightful analyses of the urbanization of poverty, the implications of public policy and the drug trade. She also conveys a deep understanding that favelas are not merely despair-filled slums but communities, in fact, many of the residents have remained there by choice. The central theme in Favela is to provide more information about urban poverty and social mobility. She provides captivating counter perspectives that add hope to what is understood about urban poverty in Latin America. She writes using compassion and personal stories to portray larger topics substantiated with statistical analysis. Perlman’s research has provided proof of an overall improvement in living standards and a surprising increase of upward mobility, especially among families that have fewer children. However, not all of her subjects make their way out of poverty. She discovers many innovative social interventions (by community organizers, nongovernmental organizations, and international agencies) that, if replicated, could have widespread benefits. Perlman worries that the emerging democracies of Latin America have so far failed to fully incorporate their expanding urban populations and produce enough good jobs. But their uplifting reportage from the edge provides solid ground for reasoned optimism. F... ... middle of paper ... ... Given the scope of the study (i.e. a 30-year period, half-a-dozen neighborhoods, thousands of individual lives), the complexity of the object and the lack of recent ethnographic fieldwork, many such findings are not fully explained, but informed conjectures are provided. Favela touches on several topics pertinent to urban scholars, and considering Brazil’s growing economy and changing domestic infrastructure, studies like this one will only become more urgent in coming years. The book does deliver powerful insights into the feelings, drives and prospects of the studied population. In all, Favela gives a sensitive and well-documented view of the world of twenty-first-century urban marginality, and calls for more ‘prolonged involvement’ (p. 339), as Perlman puts it, to match the attitudinal trends established in the surveys with the actors' practices and worldviews.

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