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This open access book provides insights into challenges, threats and opportunities of urban development in Africa. It discusses how and why African cities need localised urban planning concepts and theories to deal with challenges and threats of rapid urbanisation and climate change. The book delivers an in-depth view of the nature and gaps of the framework on which current planning practice and education in Africa are based. With that, it discusses the potentials of African cities to mobilise local knowledge, resources and capacity building for sustained and resilient urban growth. This work is addressed to educationists and practitioners in the field of urban development management, climate change adaptation and urban resilience. Specifically, such audiences include researchers, spatial planners, graduate students and member of civil societies working on urban development management.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on city edges. The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer details how the “suburban frontier” has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle class, The Suburban Frontier offers significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
Urbanisation and climate change are among the major challenges for sustainable development in Africa. The overall aim of this book is to present innovative approaches to vulnerability analysis and for enhancing the resilience of African cities against climate change-induced risks. Locally adapted IPCC climate change scenarios, which also consider possible changes in urban population, have been developed. Innovative strategies to land use and spatial planning are proposed that seek synergies between the adaptation to climate change and the need to solve social problems. Furthermore, the book explores the role of governance in successfully coping with climate-induced risks in urban areas. The book is unique in that it combines: a top-down perspective of climate change modeling with a bottom-up perspective of vulnerability assessment; quantitative approaches from engineering sciences and qualitative approaches of the social sciences; a novel multi-risk modeling methodology; and strategic approaches to urban and green infrastructure planning with neighborhood perspectives of adaptation.
This work considers the city as a gendered space and examines women’s experiences and engagement in both urbanization and sustainability. Such a focus offers distinctive insights into the question of what it means for a city to be sustainable, asking further how sustainability needs to work with gender and the gendered lives of cities’ inhabitants. Vitally, it considers women’s lives in cities and their work to forge more sustainable cities through a wide variety of means, including governmental, non-governmental and local grassroots and individual efforts towards sustainable urban life. The volume is transnational, offering case-studies from a wide range of city sites and sustainability efforts. It explores crucial questions such as the gendered nature and women’s experiences of current urbanization; the gendered nature of urban sustainability thinking and programmes; and local alternatives and resistances to dominant modes of addressing urbanization challenges.
Houses and homes are dynamic spaces within which people work to organize and secure their lives, livelihoods and relationships. Written by a team of renowned historians and anthropologists, and and accompanied by original photography by Maurice Weiss, To Be at Home: House,Work, and Self in the Modern World compares the ways people in different societies and historical periods strive to make and keep houses and homes under conditions of change, upheaval, displacement, impoverishment and violence. These conditions speak to the challenges of life in our modern world. The contributors of this volume position the home as a new nodal point between work, the self and the world to explore people’s creativity, agency and labour. Houses and homes prove complex and powerful concepts – if also often elusive – invoking places, persons, objects, emotions, values, attachments and fantasies. This book demonstrates how the relations between houses, work and the self have transformed dramatically and unpredictably under conditions of capitalism and modernity – and continue to change today.
The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities pushes the frontiers of how we understand cities and citizenship and offers new perspectives on African urbanism. Nuanced ethnographic analyses of life in an array of African cities illuminate the emergent infrastructures and spaces of belonging through which urban lives and politics are being forged.
* Explores the political, social, economic, and environmental viability of new or alternative approaches to urban development in the South * Considers how these approaches can increase access to decision-making forums, to adequate services, and to health and prosperity for all. * Case studies include cities in Argentina, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe Growing numbers of the world’s poorest people live in cities, in poor-quality housing on dangerous sites, lacking even basic services. In many countries, budgetary constraints, structural adjustment processes, increasing wealth inequalities, and lack of popular participation in governance are worsening th...