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This timely and engaging volume contributes to a number of important academic and public debates. Based on an ethnographic study of a poor neighbourhood on the edge of the city of Buenos Aires, it speaks to the literature on urban poverty, marginality, risk, environment and activism, to name the most salient themes. The book aims to convey the complexity of the context and capture the experiences of the inhabitants of 'Flammable' (Villa Inflamable) as a scholarly contribution that will also stimulate public awareness about environmental suffering and its entanglement with poverty and urban marginality.
The book provides a thoughtful and well-documented account of the everyday lives of the people of Flammable. The settlement is located in the Matanza-Riachuelo basin, close to the centre of Buenos Aires, in an area that older residents recall as having been rich in flora and fauna, a bountiful source of food and a place of beauty and enjoyment. The vivid narratives and the photos taken by informants and researchers testify to the profound changes that have taken place there. These must be understood in relation to the evolution of the industrial and petrochemical hub of Dock Sud, which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century - Shell, for example, established a refinery there in 1931. The hub has expanded over a vast area in which an unknown number of enterprises operate, largely unhindered by laws and regulations. The resident population has also grown, in spite of the increasingly...