Stolen Cars is an innovative ethnography of urban inequalities and violence in São Paulo, Brazil.
- Organized around the journeys of five stolen cars, each chapter discusses a specific theme, such as the distinctions between violent robbery and the more commercial non-violent theft or the role of national borders interconnecting illegal and legal economies
- Provides an original theoretical framework for a rarely studied urban and transnational supply chain
- Draws from empirical data and a combination of different methodologies to demonstrate mechanisms of urban inequalities and violence reproduction
- Highlights how everyday life is entangled with structural urban transformations
- Uses an ethnographic narrative to show how urban development produce various forms of illegality and violent crime
Author(s): Gabriel Feltran
Series: IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series
Publisher: Wiley
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 272
City: Hoboken
STOLEN CARS
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Series Editors’ Preface
Introduction
A Phone Call
A Global Market
Theoretical Framework: Normative Regimes
Inequalities
Methods: About Journeys, Tacking, and Our Collaborative
Research Team
A Collective Research Team
Ethical Issues, Diversity, and Typical Days
Chapter Structure
1 Crime, Violence, and Inequality in São Paulo
7 a.m. (Fiat Strada)
10:00 a.m. (Hyundai HB20)
5:15 p.m. (Fiat Palio)
8:40 p.m. (Ford Ka)
Urban Violence and Market Regulation
2 State Reaction
Police Use of Lethal Force
Imprisonment
The “Clearing of Public Roads”
Political Legitimation
3 Designing the Market
Insurance as a Mediator
The Automobile Business: From the Streets of São Paulo
to the Panama Papers
4 Auctions and Mechanisms
Central Circuits: Insurance Companies that Sell at Auctions
Some Numbers
Marginal Circuits: Car Dealerships and Chop-shops that
Buy at Auctions
Auctioneers: Economics and Politics
5 Dismantling a Stolen Car
Family, Market, Politics
Between Extremes: From “Recicla” to “Sheds”
Prices and Stratification
6 Regulating an Illegal Market
A Brief Chronology of the Dismantling Law
Old Practices, New “Political Merchandise”: The Everyday
Experience of the Dismantling Law
The Political Centrality of Police Officers
Police Regulation and Violence
7 Not Criminals, Legislators
New Laws, New Markets
Illegal Markets, Microfinance, Corporate Philanthropy
Action and Reaction
Parallel Insurance and the Protection Market
The Law that Governs the Market, the Market that Governs the Law
8 Globalization and Its Backroads
A Global Market and Its Margins
Connecting Markets
Urban Reconfigurations
North–South Urban Inequalities
Conclusions
Afterword: Following Cars in a Latin American Metropolis:
Inequality, Illegalisms, and Formalization
References
Index
