Introduction: the wealth of poverty -- More than artifacts: the materiality of poverty -- Building futures: squatting as an enabling constraint -- Too big to ignore: the state and the persistence of squatting -- "Crisis is coming": material manifestations of immaterial ends -- Moving places: barrios as barometers of national progress -- Flexible identities: negotiating values through material forms
Summary
In this book, anthropologist Erin Taylor explores how residents of a squatter settlement in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, use their material resources creatively to solve everyday problems and, over a few decades, radically transform the community. Their struggles show how these everyday engagements with materiality, rather than more dramatic efforts, generate social change and build futures
