Book notes
The nature of food consumption and production is changing. In the past, rural areas produced food primarily for cities. Urban residents often consumed more than they needed, while the poorest rural smallholders often went hungry.
Rapid growth and urbanization are affecting diets in China, creating tension among competing food-related policy goals. Between 1980 and 2010, the country’s urban population grew from 191 million to 636 million.
The largest and most detailed set of data about what are termed “slums” or “informal settlements” has been built from enumerations undertaken by the residents of these settlements and their federations. These include settlement profiles, house-by-house surveys and mapping.
The importance of effective institutions for development is well established. There is, however, a continuing debate on how to stimulate institutional reform within highly complex political and cultural contexts.
This paper discusses who eats what in China and why, with a focus on understanding the evolving axes of inequality with regard to access to affordable, safe and nutritious food in the context of changing rural–urban linkages.
Few cities in South Asia have been affected by violence more than Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and economic centre. This working paper examines the impacts of the city’s declining security situation on the control and contestation of public space.
Rights on the edge of the city: the right to water and the peri-urban water committees of Cochabamba
In cities with water sectors characterized by high degrees of informality, implementing the human right to water poses certain practical and political challenges.
Rapid urbanization and industrialization have had multiple impacts on rural Vietnam since economic reform in the mid-1980s. In 2006, the authors conducted a study of the social and economic transformations in three rural settlements in the area often described as Vietnam’s rice bowl.
The relationship among sustainable development, disaster risk management and climate change adaptation has not been treated in depth by many international institutions, national governments and localities in the past 20 years.
Published just ahead of COP 21 in Paris, this report provides readers with an evidence base, clear key messages, and useful maps and infographics.