Right to the City

<p>Based on extensive original fieldwork as well as new survey data <i>The Right to the City</i> contributes to the study of democratization by focusing on the dilemmas and opportunities of popular contention in the city of Buenos Aires. It also offers an excellent overview of the history of social mobilization in Argentina. Gabriela Ippolito-O'Donnell's main assertion in this study is that through various channels of collective action and associational activities as well as by voting the urban popular sector is a fundamental actor in the pursuit of the expansion and consolidation of citizenship rights. Using both qualitative analysis and quantitative data Ippolito-O'Donnell explores what factors--economic politico-institutional organizational and subjective--account for the emergence in the 1980s and collapse in the 1990s of a wave of grassroots popular organizations in Villa Lugano a poor neighborhood located in the south of Buenos Aires. She identifies factors crucial for explaining the organizational weakness and concomitant cyclical patterns of collective action by the urban poor as well as the consequences for alleviating poverty and inequality in this newly democratized nation.</p>