Urban transformation and public protest in Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro has arrived. Or at least that’s what the city’s authorities, and most of the international publicity the ‘cidade maravilhosa’ has received in recent years, would have us believe. After decades of economic malaise and social distress Rio’s fortunes appeared […]

The 2008 film Gomorrah, loosely based on Roberto Saviano’s book of the same name, follows the lives of five people living in Naples. Eschewing the tiresome Hollywood format of intertwining stories in which characters are thrown into each other’s paths in improbable ways, the casts of the different chapters never […]

According to the National Equality Panel’s report in 2010, London is the most unequal region in the UK and one of the most unequal cities in the world. On average, the top 10 per cent richest Londoner’s are 273 times wealthier than the bottom 10 per cent. The top 20 […]

Tucked away down a small, anonymous side street in the Lapa district of Rio a prominent sociologist, Luiz Edoardo Soares, was about to give a talk in a social centre about recent events in Brazil. First he gave a brief interview to a BBC camera crew, the reporter dressed in […]