This book unveils the political economy of land squatting in a third world city Montevideo in
Uruguay. It focuses on the effects of democratization on the mobilization of the poorest as
well as on the role played by different types of brokers from radical Catholic priests to
local leaders embedded in political networks. Through a multi-method endeavour that combines
ethnography historical sources and quantitative time series the author reconstructs the
history of the informal city since the late 1940s to the present. From a social movements
contentious politics perspective the book challenges the assumption that socioeconomic factors
such as poverty were the only causes triggering land squatting.
