Useful Transgressions: Informality, Power, and Urban Life in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

Ryan Thomas Devlin — 2026-02-17T06:00:00Z

Urban informality has been theorized as a process operating at the edges and margins under capitalist urbanization. Yet Outlaw Capital argues that the gray spaces of informality are essential to the vitality of cities, leveraged for different ends by elites and the poor alike.
On the Paraguay side of the Paraná River in Ciudad del Este, smugglers load up small boats with things like electronics and cigarettes bound for the opposite shore and eventually for consumers in Brazil, bypassing

- Reviews / informality, Latin America, South America, Global South, Paraguay, Ciudad del Este, neoliberalism, capitalism, urbanism, urbanization, gray spaces, informal urbanism, urban governance

(Re)Constructing Inequality: Community Development in Public and Private

Claire Dunning — 2021-12-14T06:00:00Z

Claire Dunning reviews Jeremy R. Levine's new book, Constructing Community, an ethnographic study of community development projects in Boston.
For a book about urban poverty and redevelopment, Constructing Community recounts few protests or headline-grabbing incidents. Instead, the drama unfolds slowly over the course of a decade in poorly lit community rooms, downtown board rooms, and the backseats of cars. This is a book about the banalities of bureaucracy and governance—a fact that author

- Reviews / Boston, Massachusetts, United States, mass transit, rapid transit, transport, public transportation, community-based organizations, urban poverty, redevelopment, poverty, governance, local governance, urban governance, ethnography

Metropolitics

Useful Transgressions: Informality, Power, and Urban Life in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

(Re)Constructing Inequality: Community Development in Public and Private