Emilio de Antunano is an assistant professor of history at Trinity University, San Antonio, specializing in urban history in Mexico and Latin America.
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Description
Abbreviations List of Illustrations Introduction: The Problem of Informality 1. Sanitary Informality in the Porfirian City 2. Revolution in the Hinterland, Revolution in the City 3. Planning and Informality 4. A Proletarian Metropolis 5. From Proletarian to Marginal Neighborhoods 6. The Housing Problem in the Era of Modernization Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
"One of the best books written on Mexico City in recent years, The Politics of Informality brilliantly captures the obscured politics of urban development and sheds new light on the ways urban governance and informality defined each other. Antunano, in this meticulously researched study, traces the legal and discursive construction of "informality"-something few urban scholars have done-and situates it as a planned and routine socio-spatial formation that lies at the center of popular claims to housing, state legitimacy, and the quest for modernization." - Matthew Vitz, UC San Diego, author of Globalizing Urban Environmental History "During half a century of explosive growth, Mexico City's residents were able to build their homes and consolidate access to public resources despite political manipulation, futuristic planning, and false promises coming from the state and its favored developers. This is a history of how legislators, administrators and architects failed to understand the implications of chilangos' skills to negotiate, ignore, or reinterpret the norms that should have made Mexico City a place of modernity and social justice." - Pablo Piccato, Columbia University, author of City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931