Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro by Bryan McCann (review)

In recent years there has been an explosion of scholarly literature on Rio de Janeiro's favelas. Many of these studies are ethnographic cases, and many focus on just a few of Rio's hundreds of favelas. While these studies allow for a rich understanding of local-level developments, they necessarily lack a broader perspective. Likewise, the history of favelas from their early beginnings through the period of drug-trafficker consolidation in the mid-1980s is relatively well documented. Yet analysis of city-wide dynamics since the mid-1980s is rare. Set in this context, Bryan McCann's Hard Times in the Marvelous City provides an invaluable addition: it at once sets recent developments a deeper historical context while at the same time providing a nuanced understanding of the last three decades.

McCann's book stands out for three reasons. First, McCann does not examine favelas themselves, but the relationship between favelas and the rest of the city and state of Rio. Challenging a narrative put forward by Rio's politicians, one often echoed in the media, McCann shows that the state has never been absent from favelas. As he states: "Favelas are obviously part of the city, and yet for over a century favela and cidade have been counterposed to each other as mutually exclusive terms" (21). Favela resident's lives have repeatedly been shaped by their relationship with the rest of the city. The exclusion, vulnerability and marginalization of favela residents emerge as the product of specific policies and complex dynamics. The incorporation of favela residents associations into structures of political representation makes this point forcefully: McCann shows that this incorporation created parallel structures which "ultimately reproduced the separation of the favela from the formal city" (195).

Second, McCann uses a comparative perspective, also examining social movements that emerged in Rio's loteamentos (irregular subdivisions) and middle-class neighborhoods. Politically mobilized favela residents were not only advocating for improvements in their neighborhoods, but were part of a larger, vibrant cross-class movement that sought larger structural changes and held out "the promise of a new imagination of Rio de Janeiro" (5). The comparison with the dynamics in loteamentos (where residents, as in many favelas, often lack full legal property title), is particularly productive. He shows how policies aimed at both favelas and loteamentos, many of them seeking to address similar issues such as a lack of urban infrastructure and irregular property titles, had such different outcomes. This, in turn, helps to reveal how and why favelas have come to be seen as so distinct even though their residents share much in common with many other Cariocas.

Third, McCann repeatedly shows how favela residents are not powerless targets of state policies, silent victims of drug-traffickers, or passive recipients of charity, but are active political agents in their own right. Here he is attuned to nuance and complexity. While favela residents have never been passive or defenseless, this does not mean that their interests have always coincided. Indeed, much of the richness of this book, in particular for contemporary scholars of favelas, lies in his description of the internal political dynamics in favelas and, especially, his discussion of the changing roles and function of favela resident associations.

McCann's historical narrative is most compelling in the chapters where he examines favela-based political mobilization in the late 1970s and early 1980s (chapter 2), and a period of attempts at urban reform in the early 1980s (chapter 3). The story here is full of hope: favela residents, among the most excluded of the city Rio, managed to forge alliances with elements of the Catholic left, find common cause with other social movements, and played a central role in the re-democratization of their city and state. The politician that they helped elect, Governor Leonel Brizola, called for a restructuring of the post...