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An exploration of the multifaceted urban environmental issues in Singapore through a more-than-human lens, calling for new ways to think of and story cities. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, politica...
COVID-19 has presented huge challenges to governments, businesses, civil societies, and people from all walks of life, but its impact has been highly variegated, affecting society in multiple negative ways, with uneven geographical and socioeconomic patterns. The crisis revealed existing contradictions and inequalities in society, compelling us to question what it means to return to “normal” and what insights can be gleaned from Southeast Asia for thinking about a post-pandemic world. In this regard, this edited volume collects the informed views of an ensemble of social scientists – area studies, development studies, and legal scholars; anthropologists, architects, economists, geograp...
This book looks at local collective action and city government responses and its impact on the neighbourhood and the city in Pacific Asia.
Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.
New urban forms characterizing contemporary metropolises reflect a certain continuity with the patterns of the past. They also include unexpected forms of settlement and design that have emerged in response to social and economic needs and as a way of leveraging new technologies. Politics of the Periphery sets out to explore sub/urban governance in diverse contexts in order to better understand how materiality and space are shaped by the possibilities and constraints of confronting actors. This collection, edited by Pierre Hamel, examines the empirical aspects of collective action and planning in eight urban regions around the world – across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa – and ...
This book investigates changing geographies of fast growing Asian metropolitan regions, in particular their peripheral areas. Through examining the intersection of global suburbanisation and Asian urbanism, the book depicts a complex (sub)urban world in Asia. It explains how the forces of globalisation, the logic of capital accumulation, and the history of rural-urban divide and interaction, path-dependent local institutions, and government policies work together to reshape the geographies of Asian urbanism. Touching on social, environmental, governance and planning aspects of contemporary urban Asia, the chapters in this volume provide grounded studies of residential relocation and changing...
A clarion call to rethink natural resource extraction beyond the extractive industries Planetary Mine rethinks the politics and territoriality of resource extraction, especially as the mining industry becomes reorganized in the form of logistical networks, and East Asian economies emerge as the new pivot of the capitalist world-system. Through an exploration of the ways in which mines in the Atacama Desert of Chile—the driest in the world—have become intermingled with an expanding constellation of megacities, ports, banks, and factories across East Asia, the book rethinks uneven geographical development in the era of supply chain capitalism. Arguing that extraction entails much more than the mere spatiality of mine shafts and pits, Planetary Mine points towards the expanding webs of infrastructure, of labor, of finance, and of struggle, that drive resource-based industries in the twenty-first century.
Sanitation is fundamental to urban public life and health. We need Sanitation for All. In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Waste in the City is a call to action on one of modern urban life’s most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All. The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’, it uses the notion of ‘citylife’ to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.
Despite contrasting approaches, democratic and authoritarian governments all underline the fact that environmental protection is crucial and inevitable—and China’s enthusiasm in stepping up its efforts to protect the environment has not gone unnoticed. This book highlights how the consensual orchestration of sustainability in China’s biggest city, Shanghai, affects non-state actors’ ways of perceiving, acting, and organizing around environmental issues. China’s Green Consensus examines grassroots realities as they intersect with events of everyday life, offering insights into areas that far transcend debates over coercive forms of environmentalism and exploring the “soft” and ...
An examination of the global trade and traffic in discarded electronics that reframes the question of the “right” thing to do with e-waste. The prevailing storyline about the problem of electronic waste frames e-waste as generated by consumers in developed countries and dumped on people and places in developing countries. In Reassembling Rubbish, Josh Lepawsky offers a different view. In an innovative analysis of the global trade and traffic in discarded electronics, Lepawsky reframes the question of the “right” thing to do with e-waste, mapping the complex flows of electronic materials. He counters the assumption that e-waste is a post-consumer problem, pointing out that waste occur...