Janice Perlman present the reader with a book that can mostly be regarded as food for thought. Her “Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio De Janeiro” is in fact not about the favelas at all, but about the people who live and have lived for years in those squatter settlements. They are the ones who have created, shaped, lived and died in the world famous shantytowns or “popular communities.” The book is about four generations of people who have always lived on the verge of life and death, ordinary sedate life and fast death. These people have been balancing between surviving and thriving. “Favela” is a book about peoples’ struggles and sufferings, as well as their attempts at rising above a hostile environment. Janice Perlman offers…show more content… The 60’s were marked by the “social cleansing” often completed by the police and official administrations. Together with drug trafficking in the 80’s and 90’s drug traffic, people were afraid. They feared a rendition of life in the favela. The fears of the 60’s and 70’s, showed that people were more afraid that their homes and whole communities would be demolished and taken apart. Since the 80’s these fears were projected onto the younger population; the same fears were loosened, either through execution by the drug cartel or an accidental coincidence of an armed confrontation of the police and accidentally in the armed confrontation between criminals and the police. More gun carried incidents occurred among gang fights. The author speaks up saying that the government realized the existence of these favelas not due to poverty, but due to the ever-increasing violence. What the government did were police interventions, and later on a number of government programs dealing with urbanization (as confirmed in the favelas visited in the last…show more content… In Part 1, Janice recounts the history of favelas, not forgetting to mention the massive migration of the population to urban areas in the latter half of the 20th century. This phenomenon has led to such a notion as proliferation of favelas in Rio. Then comes Part 2 where she assesses the data received from three favelas she scrutinized. This part is about what position social relations take up in the spatial environment and the dynamics of the favela economy. This is regarded as the key lens through which it is possible to understand the formal estate market integration or penetration.
Part 3 brings us over to phenomena of marginality, violence, democracy and mobility. The author devotes a whole chapter to trace the resurgence of the concept of marginality in the NGO and social scientific discourse on the issues of “social exclusion”. Hip hop is present as a brandishing sign defying all. The violence in connection to drugs and arms trafficking can lead to “only one thing – war on the poor” (p. 187). Further on we see Perlman describing the effects of the political corruption, drug gang terror in particular among youth – better educated, yet more cynical and vulnerable than