Urban Opportunities: Perspectives on Climate Change, Resilience, Inclusion, and the Informal Economy. A New Generation of Ideas

This book emerged from a competition for advanced graduate students, which aimed to highlight innovative ideas from a new generation of scholars on urban poverty reduction. This year’s collection of eight papers focuses particularly on links among cities, climate change challenges, resilience, inclusiveness and informal economies. Papers can also be read independently and often include literature reviews explaining the book’s main concepts, such as urban informality and vulnerability. Authors are largely from universities of the global North, and write about findings based on empirical fieldwork in countries and case studies of the global South.

A call is made for innovative planning in cities, wider institutionalization and better coordination of institutions, which should all be deeply rooted in existing local capacities in order to implement projects that are legitimate, sustainable and accountable to citizens. This is highlighted for example in the case of mainstreaming climate adaptation in two Indian cities (Chapter 1) or planning for urban adaptation in Metro Manila, Philippines (Chapter 2).

Linking science to action is another major aspiration of this book, shown through the recommendations at the end of each chapter as well as the choice of case studies and research questions. Chapter 5 on self-employment in the informal sector in Ghana, for example, focuses on the potential and barriers that need to be overcome to include unemployed young people in informal microenterprises. This issue affects 15 per cent of Ghanaians aged 15–24, in a country where 80 per cent of urban youth is already engaged in some form of informal activity. Another example of an increasingly relevant issue is the impact of mobile money on the work of micro-entrepreneurs. This shows opportunities for coupling low capital investment with the benefits of small increases in savings, hence opening up space for more financial and economic inclusion.

In sum, the book captures a range of opportunities and optimistic views from young scientists. These all highlight that we are now living in critical and potentially transformative times to act on challenges such as housing, new technologies and climate change.

Available at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/USL_140508_Urban%20Opportunities_rpt_0127.pdf

Book note prepared by Julia Wesely