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Located in the heart of Mumbai, Dharavi is estimated to be the largest slum in Asia. Often referred to as ‘Little India’, it has been home to thousands of migrants from across the country providing opportunities for work and livelihood. As such, Dharavi presents a fascinating paradox: the convergence of stereotypes associated with the slum — poverty and misery — and an effervescent economic vitality, impelled by globalisation and international capital flows. Bringing together 20 years of painstaking fieldwork, this book reveals the social, economic, political, and urban complexities that define Dharavi beneath the shadow of Mumbai, the financial capital of India. It provides a rare a...
This book looks at slums and social exclusion in the four major megacities of India and Brazil, and analyzes the interrelationships between urban policies and housing and environmental issues. The challenges posed in Delhi, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Suo Paulo have spurred public reformers into action through housing, rehabilitation and conservation programs. Civil society and the inhabitants of these cities have also begun to get involved. On the other hand, one must wonder whether these challenges were partly created by the deficiencies of these very reformers and civil society, be it their lack of intervention (as advocates of government intervention would argue), or the flaws and inadequacies of their actions (as supporters of the free market would suggest). Are policies alleviating or aggravating social exclusion This book explores these questions and more.
A restless inquiry into the cultural and psychic sources of insomnia by one of contemporary French literature’s most elegant voices. Plagued by insomnia for twenty years, Marie Darrieussecq turns her attention to the causes, implications, and consequences of sleeplessness: a nocturnal suffering that culminates at 4 a.m. and then defines the next day. “Insomniac mornings are dead mornings,” she observes. Prevented from falling asleep by her dread of exhaustion the next day, Darrieussecq turns to hypnosis, psychoanalysis, alcohol, pills, and meditation. Her entrapment within this spiraling anguish prompts her inspired, ingenious search across literature, geopolitical history, psychoanaly...
By chronicling the continuing contest over the reach, range, and regime of rights, Contracting Human Rights analyzes the way forward in an era of many challenges. This multidisciplinary book contributes to building understanding of the maturation of human rights, from a dissident doctrine to a dynamic parameter of global governance and civil society. Through an examination of both global and local challenges to human rights, including loopholes, backlash, accountability, and new opportunities to move forward, this book analyzes trends across multiple-issue areas.
This collection of articles, written by distinguished scholars in the field, addresses these and other important pre-and post-independence developments impinging on the notion of Untouchability and the Hindu caste system. By putting these developments in a wider temporal perspective-covering pre-colonial textual material as well as recent debates over the rights and identity of the Untouchables - this volume can be seen as a significant contribution to an understanding of why caste continues to play an important role in contemporary India. --Book Jacket.
Drawing Coastlines reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms. V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis.
This professional book introduces an analytical framework of urban informality perspectives in the Middle East that is aligned with the Global South. The context of Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan—in the Middle East— is the transregional focus of this book. In these contexts, the book opens a new arena of academic discussion on the theory and practice of urban informality. Urban Informality: Experiences and Urban Sustainability Transitions in Middle East Cities questions urban informality, "as a site of transitions", interrelated and interlinked with urban sustainability transitions in speedy changes in a given environment. The book presents ‘urban informality sustainability transitions’ regarding resilience and adaptability that require shifts in urban systems. Shifts from a static process to a dynamic process that eradicates the fragmentation between the tensions, anxieties, and pressures of four modes of production, reproduction, consumptions, and distribution of goods and services in the city and its practices. Finally, through eleven chapters, the concluding remarks explore to what extent and how can urban informality transitions be sustainable.
Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe brings together historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, urban planners and political activists to break new ground in the globalisation of knowledge about informal housing. Providing both methodological reflections and practical examples, they compare informal settlements, unauthorised occupation of flats, illegal housing construction and political squatting in different regions of the world. Subjects covered include squatter settlements in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, squatting activism in Brazil and Spain, right-wing squatting in Germany, planning laws and informality across countries in the Global North, and squatting in post-Second World War UK and Australia.