Despite the fact that virtually all urban growth is occurring, and will continue to occur, in the cities of the Global South, the conceptual tools used to study cities are distilled ...disproportionately from research on the highly developed cities of the Global North. With urban inequality widely recognized as central to many of the most pressing challenges facing the world, there is a need for a deeper understanding of cities of the South on their own terms.
Locating Right to the City in the Global South marks an innovative and far reaching effort to document and make sense of urban transformations across a range of cities, as well as the conflicts and struggles for social justice these are generating. The volume contains empirically rich, theoretically informed case studies focused on the social, spatial, and political dimensions of urban inequality in the Global South. Drawing from scholars with extensive fieldwork experience, this volume covers sixteen cities in fourteen countries across a belt stretching from Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East, and into Asia. Central to what binds these cities are deeply rooted, complex, and dynamic processes of social and spatial division that are being actively reproduced. These cities are not so much fracturing as they are being divided by governance practices informed by local histories and political contestation, and refracted through or infused by market based approaches to urban development. Through a close examination of these practices and resistance to them, this volume provides perspectives on neoliberalism and right to the city that advance our understanding of urbanism in the Global South.
In mapping the relationships between space, politics and populations, the volume draws attention to variations shaped by local circumstances, while simultaneously elaborating a distinctive transnational Southern urbanism. It provides indepth research on a range of practical and policy oriented i
The Origins of Scaling in Cities Bettencourt, Luis M. A.
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
06/2013, Letnik:
340, Številka:
6139
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Despite the increasing importance of cities in human societies, our ability to understand them scientifically and manage them in practice has remained limited. The greatest difficulties to any ...scientific approach to cities have resulted from their many interdependent facets, as social, economic, infrastructural, and spatial complex systems that exist in similar but changing forms over a huge range of scales. Here, I show how all cities may evolve according to a small set of basic principles that operate locally. A theoretical framework was developed to predict the average social, spatial, and infrastructural properties of cities as a set of scaling relations that apply to all urban systems. Confirmation of these predictions was observed for thousands of cities worldwide, from many urban systems at different levels of development. Measures of urban efficiency, capturing the balance between socioeconomic outputs and infrastructural costs, were shown to be independent of city size and might be a useful means to evaluate urban planning strategies.
•Climate justice is not just a matter for international debates. It must also be understood at the urban scale.•Climate justice involves distributions, procedures, rights, responsibilities and ...recognition.•Climate justice is better conceptualized as a 3D pyramid rather than a 2D plane.•Understanding climate justice demands a focus on urban climate change interventions.
Debates about climate justice have mainly occurred at the international scale, and have focussed on the rights and responsibilities of nation-states to either be protected from the effects of climate change, or to take action to reduce emissions or support adaptation. In this paper, we argue that it is both productive and necessary to examine how climate justice is being pursued at the urban scale, which brings into focus the need for attention to issues of recognition as well as rights and responsibilities. Building on work from environmental justice, which has conceptualized justice as trivalent, we propose that climate justice can be understood as a pyramid, the faces of which are distributions, procedures, rights, responsibilities and recognition. We then apply this conceptual framework to examine climate change interventions in five cities; Bangalore, Monterrey, Hong Kong, Philadelphia and Berlin. Arguing that the politics and practices of urban climate change interventions are constantly engaging with and refracting the idea of justice, we examine how justice was articulated, practiced and contested across our cases. The perspective of recognition emerges as a particularly useful entry point through which to explore the types of rights, responsibilities, distributions and procedures required to respond justly to climate change. We conclude by reflecting on our framework, arguing that it is useful both as an analytical device to interrogate climate justice and to shape the design of climate change interventions which seek to ensure climate justice.
Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor DESMOND, Matthew
The American journal of sociology,
03/2012, Letnik:
117, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Sociologists long have observed that the urban poor rely on kinship networks to survive economic destitution. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among evicted tenants in high-poverty neighborhoods, ...this article presents a new explanation for urban survival, one that emphasizes the importance of disposable ties formed between strangers. To meet their most pressing needs, evicted families often relied more on new acquaintances than on kin. Disposable ties facilitated the flow of various resources, but often bonds were brittle and fleeting. The strategy of forming, using, and burning disposable ties allowed families caught in desperate situations to make it from one day to the next, but it also bred instability and fostered misgivings among peers. Adapted from the source document.
Combining statistical and ethnographic analyses, this article explores the prevalence and ramifications of eviction in the lives of the urban poor. A quantitative analysis of administrative and ...survey data finds that eviction is commonplace in inner-city black neighborhoods and that women from those neighborhoods are evicted at significantly higher rates than men. A qualitative analysis of ethnographic data based on fieldwork among evicted tenants and their landlords reveals multiple mechanisms propelling this discrepancy. In poor black neighborhoods, eviction is to women what incarceration is to men: a typical but severely consequential occurrence contributing to the reproduction of urban poverty. Adapted from the source document.
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► Documented intense use of larger urban parks, particularly at night. ► Stronger preference and use of green spaces that are larger and have more amenities. ► Greater access barriers ...are present for women, lower-income, and peri-urban residents. ► Disparities in availability of safe and desirable green spaces in peri-urban areas. ► Higher green space use frequencies were noted for men compared to women.
Green spaces are one important indicator of urban quality of life. Yet urban green space research is often carried out in industrialized nations, with relatively little known about green space use and preferences in rapidly urbanizing cities in developing countries. With high levels of urbanization and widening inequalities in many Latin American cities, it is necessary to evaluate green space situated within cultural and geographical contexts. In this study, green space usability was explored by examining preferences, perceptions, and access barriers of parks and urban green space using on-site individual semi-structured interviews and systematic observations of behavior among a purposive sample of urban residents. We sought to determine whether certain sectors of the urban population have access to green space in close proximity of their homes and localized patterns of use in (municipal) urban parks and neighborhood parks. The revitalization and construction of urban parks in the last decade in Santa Cruz, Bolivia was found to reduce access barriers for residents by providing more desirable and safer public spaces for leisure and recreation. However, gender disparities were found in terms of usage and we document unequal distribution of larger and more desirable green spaces throughout sectors of the city, so that not all urban residents are experiencing such benefits. Results highlight the potential importance of designing green spaces to serve as equalizers in urban areas characterized by social and spatial inequalities.
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