Drawing on ethnographic research, this book shows how everyday life in the periphery is shaped by a complex web of strategies for social reproduction amid crisis in Brazil.

Thiago Canettieri proposes an understanding of geographies of critical social reproduction that goes beyond the built environment and the availability of infrastructures to focus on the spatiality that people living on the periphery produce through everyday practices. He analyzes the strategies of social reproduction of “laborless laborers” who reproduce everyday life outside waged relations, yet remain deeply dependent on a monetized market economy.

For a long time, the periphery was treated as a homogeneous space, as if all peripheries were uniform and unchanging. 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, to consider the differences and heterogeneities that exist in the populations that live in the peripheries.

Canettieri goes on to examine the metropolitan periphery of Belo Horizonte and provide a critical perspective on the recent wageless urbanization process, discussing how divergent meanings of the world are constructed and how conflicting conceptions of normativity coexist.