Book notes
Thirsting for a Future opens with a provocative sentence: “No one suffers more from a change in climate than a child” (page 8).
Water and Politics comes at a time when the problem of water delivery to millions of urban residents in the global South is “increasingly fraught with inequality, corruption and social conflict” (page 214).
Self-reliance is, by definition, about individualized responsibility for social wellbeing and economic security. This idea drives urban refugee livelihood programmes, in India and beyond, as aid organizations seek to ensure refugees do not depend on assistance long term.
The Boko Haram insurgency has engulfed many parts of Northern Nigeria since 2010. About 2 million people have fled into urban areas around crisis zones. However, barely 10 per cent of these internally displaced people (IDPs) are sheltered in formal humanitarian camps.
There has been a contentious relationship throughout history between water and cities. Cities need water for their existence; yet their very existence threatens water resources and supply, and degrades water quality.
Planetary Gentrification, by Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales, explores two principal questions: Does the concept of gentrification have a global application, and does generalized gentrification really exist?
Humanitarian crises in cities require responses that reflect the urban context, address urban challenges, and provide urbanised solutions. This paper focuses on providing guidance on good practice in cash for work (CfW) programmes.
Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa is a collaborative effort of the Isandla Institute, the African Centre for Cities, and others.
This is a follow-up to the 2001 Handbook of Urban Studies, and shows the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of scholarship that falls under the urban studies label. The editors explain in the introduction that they deliberately avoided a linear approach to editing this collection.
Urban areas are now home to over half the global population as well as two thirds of the world’s refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs).