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Each year, millions of children die of environmental causes and many more suffer serious illness or injury. Children are often the most vulnerable to the condition of their environment -and their health is an index of its quality - but their wellbeing is rarely given priority by governments or aid agencies. Ironically, the problems can be traced back to matters which can be treated straightforwardly and at relatively low cost - poor drinking water or food, or infectious diseases which can be controlled. This book gives a multidisciplinary account of the environmental health hazards threatening children and the range of impacts they can have. It also explains what can be done, by communities ...
Using concepts from urban and cultural studies, City Fictions examines the representation of the city in the works of five important late-twentieth-century Spanish American authors, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Christina Peri Rossi, Diamela Eltit, and Carlos Monsavais. While each of these authors is influenced at least partially by a specific Spanish American city, be it Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, or Santiago, the element that brings them together is the way in which the city is fictionalized in their work: they all equate both language and the body with urban space. In these metaphors, language breaks down and the body disintegrates, creating a disturbing picture of violent decline. The poetry of Paz associates the urban surroundings with dissolving sentences and desensitized, fingertips; for Cortazar, characters walking through cities are seen as both creating and unraveling written texts;
Since the Stockholm Environment Conference in 1972 and the Rio Summit in 1992, there has been unprecedented public concern for the future of the planet and a growing awareness that development needs to be sustainable. This text charts the growth of these ideas by beginning with a visionary piece written by Barbara Ward in the 1970s, and ends with a chapter looking ahead another 30 years into the future. Two generations of thinkers and activists have helped to shape environment and development policy and increase local level power in environmental management. In celebration of their 30th anniversary, the IIED's most influential writers provide in this volume a perspective on three decades of development and green debates.
"Once one of the most important port cities in the New World, Havana was a model for the planning and construction of other colonial cities. This book tells the story of how Havana was conceived, built, and managed and explores the relationship between colonial empire and urbanization in the Americas. Guadalupe GarcĂa shows how the policing of urban life and public space by imperial authorities from the sixteenth century onward was explicitly centered on politics of racial exclusion and social control. She illustrates the importance of colonial ideologies in the production of urban space and the centrality of race and racial exclusion as an organizing ideology of urban life in Havana. Beyond the Walled City connects colonial urban practices to contemporary debates on urbanization, the policing of public spaces, and the urban dislocation of black and ethnic populations across the region"--Provided by publisher.
In 2008 for the first time the majority of the planet's inhabitants lived in cities and towns. Becoming globally urban has been one of mankind's greatest collective achievements over time, and raises many questions. How did global city systems evolve and interact in the past? How have historic urban patterns impacted on those of the contemporary world? And what were the key drivers in the roller-coaster of urban change over the millennia - market forces such as trade and industry, rulers and governments, competition and collaboration between cities, or the urban environment and demographic forces? This pioneering comparative work by leading scholars drawn from a range of disciplines offers t...