Opportunities and Deprivation in the Urban South

While he sees value in both macro-level explanations of poverty that focus on economic conditions and the labor market and micro-level explanations that focus on individual attributes, credentials, and behaviors, Marques (political science, U. of Sao Paulo, Brazil) believes that a mid-level consideration of relational patterns as explanatory of poverty has been undervalued. In this book, he aims to show the relevance of this mid-level relational analysis to understanding the production and reproduction of poverty and to demonstrate the ways in which social networks and segregation mediate the accesses individuals have to different structures of opportunities and to different sources of welfare. In pursuit of this goal, he addresses four key issues: the nature of networks among Brazil's metropolitan poor and how they are conditioned and influenced; the ways in which networks are associated with distinct sociability patterns and urban segregation; the consequences of networks for individuals and poverty in general; and the mechanisms by which networks influence living conditions, poverty, and social inequality in the daily lives of individuals. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Eduardo Cesar LeA￡o Marques is Livre-docente Professor in the Department of Political Science and a researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the University of SA￡o Paulo, Brazil