Theorising Urban Development From the Global South


Book Description

This edited volume brings together debates from the Global South and Global East to explore alternatives to conventional planning in Southern cities. Embracing the evolving post-colonial theory, the volume offers ‘fragments’ of the urban that provide clues to the larger, often-repeated ontological question that continues to hold: Why and what does theory from the South mean? The chapters derive from and speak to the simultaneously homogenous and heterogeneous South. They focus on presenting the alternative realities of Southern cities as critical analytical lenses that can build up to the theorisation of the Southern urban with a potential to (re)understand the contemporary urban world. The contributions explore locally rooted knowledge systems, premised on social and cultural practices, as possible conduits to evolving planning methods. In doing so, the volume breaks apart the linear modernity that urban theory from the North relies on. Chapters [Chapter-1] and [Chapter-11] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.




Tourism Planning and Development in Latin America


Book Description

Despite the significance of tourism to the economic, social and environmental structures of Central and South America, little has been documented in the English literature about tourism in this sub-region, which in terms of population size, ranks fourth in the world with 652 million inhabitants. The first of its kind, this book focuses exclusively on tourism development, planning and their impacts in a wide number of Central and South American countries. It covers experiences, challenges, successful and unsuccessful stories, specific cases, and other tourism related issues of twelve countries in total. Each chapter is authored by scholars who have done extensive research on tourism in the countries covered.




Entangled Heritages


Book Description

Relying on the concept of a shared history, this book argues that we can speak of a shared heritage that is common in terms of the basic grammar of heritage and articulated histories, but divided alongside the basic difference between colonizers and colonized. This problematic is also evident in contemporary uses of the past. The last decades were crucial to the emergence of new debates: subcultures, new identities, hidden voices and multicultural discourse as a kind of new hegemonic platform also involving concepts of heritage and/or memory. Thereby we can observe a proliferation of heritage agents, especially beyond the scope of the nation state. This volume gets beyond a container vision of heritage that seeks to construct a diachronical continuity in a given territory. Instead, authors point out the relational character of heritage focusing on transnational and translocal flows and interchanges of ideas, concepts, and practices, as well as on the creation of contact zones where the meaning of heritage is negotiated and contested. Exploring the relevance of the politics of heritage and the uses of memory in the consolidation of these nation states, as well as in the current disputes over resistances, hidden memories, undermined pasts, or the politics of nostalgia, this book seeks to seize the local/global dimensions around heritage.




Design for Vulnerable Communities


Book Description

This book aims to provide bases for reasoning on what challenges urban-architectural design for vulnerable communities will face in the coming years. Several issues, such as technological development, climate change, political crisis and economic uncertainties show as traditional strategies and methodologies are not sufficient to deeply solve the problems of these complex realities. These new changes, which are studied in different fields of knowledge, highlight the fact that the development of effective solutions must be characterized by multidisciplinary approaches and must be based on strategies promoted by different disciplines. For this reason, this contributed volume collects contributions and considerations from experts in various fields of knowledge working in different parts of the world, such as the Americas, Europe and Asia. The goal is precisely to provide the reader with multidisciplinary knowledge and methodologies in order to better reflect and analyze the challenges that designing for vulnerable communities will face in the next few years. These multidisciplinary studies are organized into five sections: Sustainability and Vulnerabilities in Time of the Anthropocene Approaches, Principles and Paradigms to Contemporary Research and Practice for Vulnerable Communities Designing for Vulnerabilities: Applications and Actions Social Engagement in Vulnerable Communities Between Digital and Humanist Visions Vulnerabilities in Context: Analysis and Projects in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region Design for Vulnerable Communities will be of interest primarily to researchers and professionals in the field of urban-architectural design, but it will also be a useful tool to policy makers and members of civil society at large interested in making cities more inclusive.




The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization investigates the mutual relationship between the struggle for political inclusion and processes of informal urbanization in different socio-political and cultural settings. It seeks a middle ground between two opposing perspectives on the political meaning of urban informality. The first, the ‘emancipatory perspective’, frames urban informality as a practice that fosters autonomy, entrepreneurship and social mobility. The other perspective, more critical, sees informality predominantly as a result of political exclusion, inequality, and poverty. Do we see urban informality as a fertile breeding ground for bottom-up democracy and more political participation? Or is urban informality indeed merely the result of a democratic deficit caused by governing autocratic elites and ineffective bureaucracies? This book displays a wide variety of political practices and narratives around these positions based on narratives conceived upon specific case cities. It investigates how processes of urbanization are politicized in countries in the Global South and in transition economies. The handbook explores 24 cities in the Global South, as well as examples from Eastern Europe and East Asia, with contributions written by a global group of scholars familiar with the cases (often local scholars working in the cities analyzed) who offer unique insight on how informal urbanization can be interpreted in different contexts. These contributions engage the extreme urban environments under scrutiny which are likely to be the new laboratories of 21st-century democracy. It is vital reading for scholars, practitioners, and activists engaged in informal urbanization.




Begging as a Path to Progress


Book Description

Examining beggars' organized migration networks, as well as the degree to which children can express agency and fulfill personal ambitions through begging, Swanson argues that Calhuasí, Equador's beggars are capable of canny engagement with the forces of change.




Ecuadorians in Madrid


Book Description

In the decade between 1998-2008, Spain became the main destination for Ecuadorian migrants, and Madrid, Spain's capital, became the city with the largest Ecuadorian population outside of Ecuador. Through a combination of ethnographic research and cultural analysis, this book addresses the interconnections between spatial practices, cultural production, and definitions of citizenship in migration dynamics between Ecuador and Spain, showing how Ecuadorians are key actors in Madrid's recent urban history. Looking at the city as form and content, constitutive and constituting of ideological processes, each chapter analyzes the spatial practices of Madrid's Ecuadorian residents through various forms: the body, the home, public and leisure spaces, the city, the nation, and transnational circuits. Rather than addressing migrants as a general human type marked by (dis)placement, each chapter offers an illustration of how Ecuadorian migrants forge transnational processes through their everyday lives in specific time and place, and how these processes manifest culturally on both sides of the Atlantic.




Selling EthniCity


Book Description

Bringing together a multidisciplinary team of scholars, this book explores the importance of ethnicity and cultural economy in the post-Fordist city in the Americas. It argues that cultural, political and economic elites make use of cultural and ethnic elements in city planning and architecture in order to construct a unique image of a particular city and demonstrates how the use of ethnicized cultural production - such as urban branding based on local identities - by the economic elite raises issues of considerable concern in terms of local identities, as it deploys a practical logic of capital exchange that can overcome forms of cultural resistance and strengthen the hegemonic colonization of everyday life. At the same time, it shows how ethnic communities are able to use ethnic labelling of cultural production, ethnic economy or ethno-tourism facilities in order to change living conditions and to empower its members in ways previously impossible. Of wide ranging interest across academic disciplines, this book will be a useful contribution to Inter-American studies.




Children's Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments


Book Description

How children experience, negotiate and connect with or resist their surroundings impacts on their health and wellbeing. In cities, various aspects of the physical and social environment can affect children’s wellbeing. This edited collection brings together different accounts and experiences of children’s health and wellbeing in urban environments from majority and minority world perspectives. Privileging children’s expertise, this timely volume explicitly explores the relationships between health, wellbeing and place. To demonstrate the importance of a place-based understanding of urban children’s health and wellbeing, the authors unpack the meanings of the physical, social and symbolic environments that constrain or enable children’s flourishing in urban environments. Drawing on the expertise of geographers, educationists, anthropologists, psychologists, planners and public health researchers, as well as nurses and social workers, this book, above all, sees children as the experts on their experiences of the issues that affect their wellbeing. Children’s Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments will be fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in cultural geography, urban geography, environmental geography, children’s health, youth studies or urban planning.