Exploring the outskirts of South America's largest city, Sao Paulo, Justin McGuirk analyzes the different forms of housing there and talks to its residents, who are struggling to survive on the borders of an unforgiving metropolis. Traveling counterclockwise, the reader travels back in time with the author, moving from slums made of cardboard boxes and hastily erected high-rise buildings to examples of modernist social housing and a factory town built at the beginning of the last century. The city's outskirts are not written about in guidebooks, there are no tourists there, but this is where the majority of the city's population lives, and, as Justin McGuirk argues, it is its periphery that determines the future of a city. Translation: Maxim Korobochkin