Drawing on ethnographic research, this book shows how everyday life in the periphery undergoes a complex web of strategies for social reproduction in Brazil. Thiago Canettieri proposes an understanding of geographies of critical social reproduction that goes beyond the built environment and availability of infrastructures, and focuses on the spatiality that people living on the periphery produce on a daily basis such as spatial practices and representations of space. He analyzes the strategies for social reproduction that people who live in the periphery engage with. This form of social reproduction has moved away from the waged relation between capital and labor but is still dependent on money. For a long time, the periphery was treated as a homogeneous space, as if all peripheries were uniform and indifferent. However, ethnographic studies that follow the daily dynamics of the periphery highlight the internal differences that exist in these territories. There is a growing interest in analytically breaking down this homogeneous monolith and dealing with the differences and heterogeneities that exist in the populations that live in the peripheries. Canettieri examines the metropolitan periphery of Belo Horizonte and provides in-depth research on how different identities within the periphery relate, how different meanings of the world are constructed, and how different conflicting conceptions of normativity coexist.

Thiago Canettieri is Professor of Urbanism in the Architecture Department at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.