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The integration of food into urban planning is a crucial and emerging topic. Urban planners, alongside the local and regional authorities that have traditionally been less engaged in food-related issues, are now asked to take a central and active part in understanding how food is produced, processed, packaged, transported, marketed, consumed, disposed of and recycled in our cities. While there is a growing body of literature on the topic, the issue of planning cities in such a way they will increase food security and nutrition, not only for the affluent sections of society but primarily for the poor, is much less discussed, and much less informed by practices. This volume, a collaboration be...
This book examines the active role of urban citizens in constructing alternative urban spaces as tangible resistance towards capitalist production of urban spaces that continue to encroach various neighborhoods. The collection of narratives presented here brings together research from ten different Asian cities and re-theorises the city from the perspective of ordinary people facing moments of crisis, contestations, and cooperative quests to create alternative spaces to those being produced under prevailing urban processes. The chapters accent the exercise of human agency through daily practices in the production of urban space and the intention is not one of creating a romantic or utopian vision of what a city "by and for the people" ought to be. Rather, it is to place people in the centre as mediators of city-making with discontents about current conditions and desires for a better life.
The two authors complement each other beautifully, one a visionary and gutsy politician, the other a gifted academic with a deep rooted social conscience. With the benefit of a century of post Letchworth Garden City knowledge and the lessons of two World Wars, their timely released book re-brands the Garden City from a social as well as a technical point of view. It says it's a manifesto for 21st Century Garden Cities of To-Morrow, but it could equally be a manifesto for decent human urban survival on our cherished Planet. It concentrates on the role of each citizen - his or her responsibilities and opportunities. It advocates restoring basic human values back to ordinary people, away from the `I'm doing you a favour' private pro-bono benefaction and/or cash-starved governmental institutions that seem to know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
Why does humanity seem unable to step off its unsustainable path, even with so many direct symptoms - from climate change to ecological destruction and peak resources - becoming more and more apparent? Striving to answer this question, The Schizophrenic Society marshals many different insights from such areas as history, sociology, politics, philosophy, psychology, economics, and anthropology. The resulting story is an important one that exposes both human and societal shortcomings when grappling with the fundamental issue that we’re faced with: the continued growth in humanity’s claims upon Earth’s finite resources. In plain language, the author takes us on a journey, back to the dawn...
The Challenge of Slums presents the first global assessment of slums, emphasizing their problems and prospects. Using a newly formulated operational definition of slums, it presents estimates of the number of urban slum dwellers and examines the factors at all level, from local to global, that underlie the formation of slums as well as their social, spatial and economic characteristics and dynamics. It goes on to evaluate the principal policy responses to the slum challenge of the last few decades. From this assessment, the immensity of the challenges that slums pose is clear. Almost 1 billion people live in slums, the majority in the developing world where over 40 per cent of the urban popu...