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This article is based on a four-generational study of residents in three squatter communities (favelas) in Rio de Janeiro from 1968 to 2003. It shows how the marginalization of the urban poor has deepened over the past thirty-five years through drug-related violence, the failure of democracy to deliver on its promise of voice for the disenfranchised, the stigma of place and race, the increase in unemployment, and the inability to translate educational gains into concomitant income or occupational gains. Despite significant improvements in consumption of collective urban services, household goods, and schooling, few have been successful enough to move into “good neighborhoods” or into professional jobs. Gang violence creates a pervasive sense of fear and diminishes the social capital of the communities. Despite the promise of the end of the dictatorship in 1984, favela residents feel they are more excluded. Yet they still have hope that their lives will improve in the future.

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The focus of this paper is the effect of contemporary globalization on poverty and inequality in cities of the 'global south'. Specifically it addresses the impact of globalization on marginalized communities-slums, squatter settlements and shantytowns-collectively called 'informal settlements'. This is a timely issue given that over the next 25 years virtually all of the population growth worldwide will be in the cities of developing countries largely concentrated in such settlements.The paper takes a critical look at current assumptions about globalization, urban poverty, and inequality, distinguishing between different constructs and aspects of globalization and separating causality from co-terminality. It questions how the informal sector would fare in the face of advanced capitalism and technological transformations, absent the global component.Using Brazil as an example the paper draws comparisons between the lives of the poor during the isolationist period of 'import substitution' and the military dictatorship and their current lives in the context of pervasive globalization of ideas, icons, and identities. The findings are based on a longitudinal panel study conducted in the favelas …/.