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This book unveils the political economy of land squatting in a third world city, Montevideo, in Uruguay. It focuses on the effects of democratization on the mobilization of the poorest as well as on the role played by different types of brokers, from radical Catholic priests to local leaders embedded in political networks. Through a multi-method endeavour that combines ethnography, historical sources, and quantitative time series, the author reconstructs the history of the informal city since the late 1940s to the present. From a social movements/contentious politics perspective, the book challenges the assumption that socioeconomic factors such as poverty were the only causes triggering land squatting.

En la última década del siglo XX la ciudad de Montevideo sufrió cambios drásticos. El número de barrios informales creció como nunca en la historia de la ciudad. Muchos de esos barrios se formaron a partir de invasiones organizadas, es decir, mediante un proceso en el que un grupo identificó un terreno disponible, lo invadió, trazó calles y lotes, negoció con las autoridades y se organizó para demandar servicios públicos. Este artículo se pregunta qué explica la ola de invasiones de tierra planificadas en torno a 1990 en Montevideo. A partir de análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de eventos de invasión a través del tiempo, argumenta que el aumento de la competencia electoral y la llegada de la coalición de izquierda Frente Amplio al gobierno de la ciudad, constituyeron una oportunidad política clave para los pobres urbanos. ; The city of Montevideo changed drastically during the last decade of the twentieth century. The number of informal neighborhoods increased in an unprecedented manner. Many of these neighborhoods started as organized land invasions, that is, with a group identifying a piece of land, invading it, outlining streets and plots, negotiating with authorities and organizing to demand public services. This article asks what explains the wave of organized land invasions in Montevideo around 1990. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis of squatting events over time, it argues that the rising electoral competition and the arrival of the leftist coalition Frente Amplio to the city government, constituted a key political opportunity for the urban poor.

AbstractThrough the in-depth ethnographic study of one squatter neighborhood in Montevideo and its leader's political networks, this article illustrates a successful strategy through which some squatter neighborhoods have fought for their right to the city. This consists of opportunistic, face-to-face relationships between squatter leaders and politicians of various factions and parties as intermediaries to get state goods, such as water, building materials, electricity, roads, and ultimately land tenure. Through this mechanism, squatters have seized political opportunities at the national and municipal levels. These opportunities were particularly high between 1989 and 2004, years of great competition for the votes of the urban poor on the periphery of the city, when the national and municipal governments belonged to opposing parties. In terms of theory, the article discusses current literature on clientelism, posing problems that make it difficult to characterize the political networks observed among squatters.

This article introduces the first version of a new, standardized data tool that can be used to test models of global income allocation, the Standardized Income Distribution Database (SIDD). It is based on a comprehensive collection of income distribution data compiled by the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU‐WIDER 2000). International and intertemporal inconsistencies in these data have historically limited its use. We estimate adjustment factors for different scopes of coverage, income definitions, and reference units which, when applied to the raw data, bring all data to a common standard based on national coverage, gross income, and household per capita inequality. Criterion validity checks confirm that these adjustments boost the correlation between measured income inequality and national social indicators. The SIDD is also clean, free of duplicates, and easy to access. The SIDD will be useful both to students reading income inequality and to those conducting broad cross‐national research on the relationship between income inequality and a range of important outcomes, such as health, criminality, and social support.