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The focus of this chapter is the effect of contemporary globalization on poverty and inequality in cities of the ‘global south’. Specifically it addresses the impact of globalization on marginalized communities—slums, squatter settlements, and shantytowns—collectively called ‘informal settlements’. This is a timely issue given that over the next 25 years virtually all of the population growth worldwide will be in the cities of developing countries largely concentrated in such settlements. The chapter takes a critical look at current assumptions about globalization, urban poverty, and inequality, distinguishing between different constructs and aspects of globalization and separating causality from coterminality. It questions how the informal sector would fare in the face of advanced capitalism and technological transformations, absent the global component. Using Brazil as an example, the chapter draws comparisons between the lives of the poor during the isolationist period of ‘import substitution’ and the military dictatorship and their current lives in the context of pervasive globalization of ideas, icons, and identities. The findings are based on a longitudinal panel study conducted in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro between 1968 and 2005, examining the changes over time, space, and generations. The presumed effects of globalization on the lives of the urban poor, on the levels of inequality between them, and the rest of the city and on public policy are thrown into question. The answers are sought in the people's perceptions of the impact of globalization on their lives, in the historic transformations of the country and city, and in the life‐history, survey data, and open‐ended interviews collected over this 35‐year period.

Due to industrialization and employment opportunities, Brazil's urban population experienced a significant increase that started during the 1950s. However, because legal and affordable housing options were evidently limited, migrants had to resort to making use of unused private and public land which are referred to as favelas. Although such favelas accommodate a huge part of the population and because of how these communities have been established illegally, favelas are not without problems, such as poor living conditions, high population density, irregular construction, and limited access to various services such as sanitation, running water, and electricity, among others. Recently, legislation and policies have veered away from eradicating favelas and moved towards recognizing property rights and integration through such measures as the Favela-Bairro programme. This chapter examines how residents of one of Rio de Janeiro's largest favela have been able to use community, city, and legal resources in dealing with various issues.

In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.

The introduction historicizes the evolution of favelas in the imaginary of the city. It illustrates how favelas, constructed as a site of Otherness and/or authenticity, have become more recently a consumable good. With the pacification process, favelas have become a seductive component of the city, attracting many interests, and a clear process of urban development is under way. The chapter describes how successive urban remodeling plans have resulted in the eviction of many residents—mostly low-income, black segments of the population. It defines favela-based cultural productions as counter-narratives that are implicated in the articulation of alternative identities and geographies. Finally, it conveys the methods used in the book and the general organization of the book.

Rio de Janeiro began the twentieth century as capital of a nation that had ended slavery and monarchical rule only in 1888-89. In the new republic, coffee exports and early industrialization concentrated in São Paulo. Rio drew people recently out of slavery and/or escaping the struggling sugar economy of Northeast to irregular subdivisions and informal favelas. As the century moved forward, both the Vargas regime (1930-54, 1950-54) and the military dictatorship (1964-85) promoted formal urban development with land titles and services while the national capital and much of the bureaucracy moved to Brasilia after 1960 and Rio’s limited industrial base corroded. The urban population kept growing, driving a return of informal development as military rule ceded to re-democratization. Favelas, informal subdivisions, and social marginality spread again as criminal enterprises linked to the global drug economy brought limited prosperity and rising violence to the metropolis—contradictions that hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics could not resolve.

Rio de Janeiro has undertaken massive urban transformations in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. The chapter examines the coupling of favela urbanization programs—such as the PAC favelas and the Morar Carioca program—with the public security policy known as the Pacification Police Units (UPPs). It is particularly concerned with how this juxtaposition produces new spaces, territorialities, and structures of legitimization for community leaders.

The chapter covers the first two decades of the twentieth century, when a drastic Paris-inspired urban reform in the Old City helped to create the idea (and to an extent the reality) of ‘two Rios de Janeiro’: one modern and beautiful, the other uncivilized and inhabited by the undesired. The chapter focuses not only on the ‘other’ city, but on mediating figures that frequented its different spaces, like the composer Chiquinha Gonzaga, and two mulatos and prominent writers whose works assume critical importance: João do Rio, a mixture of flâneur and investigative journalist, and the ‘damned’ novelist Lima Barreto, an active critic of the republic and its urban reforms. Less-well-known texts, like the travel accounts of João Pinheiro Chagas (a future prime minister of Portugal), also generate broader insights about urban development, and into the Cidade Nova’s role as a type of contact zone between expanding suburbs, the commercial and political centre, the port, and nascent favelas, or shanties built on hillsides.