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Publications (47)
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– Successful Policy Innovation in Three Colombian Cities
This paper evaluates transformative policy innovations with respect to security and taxation in the three main Colombian cities: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. In the first two, such policies were associated with huge success. Elsewhere we (Gutiérrez et al. 2009) have tagged these transformation...
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– Improving Diagnosis or the Need to Shift the Understanding Urban Inequality from Fixed Enclaves to Mobile Gradients
Current urban interventions, particularly in cities in developing countries like Santiago de Chile, evidence major neglect in understanding the way contemporary living takes place and how it is changing under processes of globalization, global warming, technological advances, as well as specific...
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– Impact on Housing Improvements and Health
This study examines the programme Redes Solidarias, a public-private initiative that connected to natural pipelined gas 4,000 households in the Great Buenos Aires Area during 2005. The main features of the institutional framework are described and the main results of an impact estimation analysis...
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– Evidence from Brazil, 1995-2000
During the twentieth century, internal migration and urbanization shaped Brazil’s economic and social landscape. Cities grew tremendously, while immigration participated in the rapid urbanization process and the redistribution of poverty between rural and urban areas. In 1950, about a third of...
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– Participation, Politics, and Urban Segregation in Latin America
Many commentators have noted the existence of a historical correlation between cities and democratization. This image of the city as an inherently civic space is linked to the notion that the spatial concentration intrinsic to urban contexts promotes a democracy of proximity. Seen from this...
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– The Case of the Housing Movements of São Paulo
This study focuses on the city of São Paulo, Brazil and examines the ways in which irregular and illegal growth have influenced the collective action of social movements of the urban poor. The study describes how São Paulo grew as a socially segregated city during the twentieth century due to...
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– Designing Strategies for Urban Opportunities in Informal Settlements of Buenos Aires City
This article surveys the problem of urban marginalization by one of its more critical expressions in the contemporary city: the slums. The aim is to define an urban design strategy for the integration of those settlements as part of the city context, which enables to find solutions for the conflict...
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A growing number of cities around the world have established systems of monitoring the quality of urban life. Many of those systems combine objective and subjective information and attempt to cover a wide variety of topics. This paper introduces a simple method that takes advantage of both types of...
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– The Case of Ferias Libres in Santiago de Chile
Unlike in most Latin American cities, street vendors organized in farmers’ markets popularly known as ferias libres in Santiago de Chile, gained legal recognition early in the twentieth century. Since then, comunas, or local municipalities, have provided vendors with individual licenses that...
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– Lessons from the Role of the Urban Sector in Argentina
International narratives on Argentina’s recovery from the crisis of 2001-02 tend to emphasize the role of rising commodity prices and growing demand from China. Argentina is said to have been ‘lucky’, saved by global demand for its agricultural exports. The international narrative has also been used...
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– Exploring the Relationship between Urban Processes and the Drug Trade in South America
The relationship between the cocaine trade and urban land markets in South America has been overlooked by the mainstream economics and urban studies literature. This paper examines two avenues through which the cocaine trade can have a large impact on urban development in producer countries: (i)...
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– Towards a Renewed Perspective on the City
This paper argues for a more systemic engagement with Latin American cities, contending it is necessary to reconsider their unity in order to nuance the ‘fractured cities’ perspective that has widely come to epitomise the contemporary urban moment in the region. It begins by offering an overview of...
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Land efficiency in urban China is examined, using Tianjin as a case study, from the perspective of agricultural land conservation; reduction in energy use, conventional pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions; and human time savings. Issues addressed include increased scatter on the periphery, over...
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– Resident Koreans in Japan
This paper discusses the development of Korean communities in Japan from their origins in the late nineteenth century through their stabilization following the Second World War. Approaching the developing communities from a spatial perspective, the chapter compares Tokyo and Osaka and shows the...
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– Evidence from Bangalore (India)
This paper aims at economic analysis of economic globalization and urban growth of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, as they are related to ICT sector. Overall analyses offer new insights and evidences for ICT sector as a major contributor for degree of economic globalization and urban...
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– International Migration and the Global City
Cities are the focal point for the mobility of talents, located between the nations and firms, states and educational institutions. Shanghai, being regarded as the 'ultimate poster-child for the effects of globalization on cities and regions' by the BBC (2007), the city is argued as the best...
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This paper overviews the debate on the relationship between the measures of globalization, economic growth and pace of urbanization, and speculates on its impact on the quality of life and poverty in the context of Asian countries. After experiencing moderate to high urban growth for three to four...
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The East Asian countries are currently experiencing declining fertility rates and aging of their populations. The demographic transition is beginning to affect various societal functions, and increasing international migrants are becoming one of the responses to the transition, despite the...
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– Effects of Household Perceptions, Illness, and Environmental Pollution on Clean Water Investment
Recent efforts to reinvigorate the connections between urban planning and health have usefully brought the field back to one of its original roles. Current research, however, has focused on industrialized cities, overlooking some of the important urbanization processes in poor countries. This paper...
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– How Can Colombo Prevent the Emerging Chaos?
This paper examines urbanization trends, the growth of Colombo and its present state of development. It looks at the approaches to the planned interventions in the city and demonstrates how a uni-directional urban development has had a detrimental impact upon healthy growth and quality of life in a...
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– How Targeting Has Left out the Poor in Peripheral Cities in the Philippines
Constrained by resource limitations and challenged by the increasing incidence of poverty in the country, the Philippine government embarked on an anti-poverty programme that sought to identify where the poorest people were, what were their specific needs, and how government and other stakeholders...
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Indonesia went through a process of fiscal decentralization in 2001 involving the devolution of several policymaking and service delivery functions to the subnational tiers of government (provinces and districts). This process is likely to have affected regional patterns of urbanization, because the...
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– Negotiating Closed Doors and Windows of Opportunity
This paper examines land tenure in informal urban settlements in India from a gender perspective through field research conducted in Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA). The author describes the formal and informal tenure arrangements that were in place in...
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Cities—especially those with substantial poor populations—will face increasingly severe challenges in tackling the impacts of global environmental change (GEC). As economic dynamos and increasingly important population concentrations, cities both contribute substantially, and often are very...
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– Urban Governance and the Politics of Popular Livelihoods in Nigeria
This paper examines how decentralization and informalization are reshaping urban governance in contemporary Africa. By exploring the interface between urban institutional failures and popular organizational solutions, the paper considers how informal governance processes feed into wider structural...
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– Building and Belonging in African Cities
Accepting that successful ‘development’ is premised on a population’s participation in a collective undertaking, we must understand urban residents’ interactions and ambitions. In African cities being transformed by geographic and social mobility, it is unclear what forms of inclusion, solidarity or...
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In an introductory section, this paper considers briefly the achievements and problems of urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa through an assessment of three categories: administrative reform, developmental issues and conflicts over service delivery issues. It then goes on to assess...
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Urbanization is one of the critical global trends shaping the future of humanity. At the same time, it has been argued that full development requires an urbanized environment. This paper attempts to examine and characterize the major phases of urbanization in Uganda and what this means for urban...
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– Implications for Urban Development in Nigeria
The paper investigates the impact of infrastructural development on poverty reduction in Nigeria. Specifically, the relative effects of physical and social infrastructure on living standards or poverty indicators are examined, with a view to providing empirical evidence on the implications of...
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This paper explores one possible argument for how to respond to the epistemic troubles in the production of knowledge about urban Africa. The problem I have in mind is the preponderance of policy-oriented research on the development challenges and absences of African cities, as opposed to a more...
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– a Case Study
China's urban geography has been dramatically altered over the past three decades. The co-presence of splinters in urban fabric—contrasting and continuously changing in terms of condition, use, and socio-cultural consistency—is symptomatic for the country's contemporary transition, suspending...
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– A Case Study of India
South Asia has the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world, despite rapid economic growth compared to other regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. Known as the ‘South Asian enigma’ this feature is partly attributed to the low status of women in South Asian societies. This paper examines this...
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– Explaining the Prevalence of Slums in Developing Countries
One of the most visible and enduring manifestations of urban poverty in developing countries is the formation and proliferation of slums. While attention has focused on the rapid pace of urbanization as the sole or major factor explaining the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements in...
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– Towards a New Measure of Urban Concentration
A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations (UN) compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized definition of ‘urban’, resulting in inconsistencies...
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This paper describes the gaps and limitations in the data available on urban populations for many low- and middle-income nations and how this limits the accuracy of international comparisons – for instance of levels of urbanization and of the size of city populations. It also discusses how the lack...
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– A Multi-generational Panel Study in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas, 1968–2008
This paper describes the methodology of a longitudinal multi-generational study in the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro from 1968 to 2008. Major political transformations took place in Brazil during this interval: from dictatorship to ‘opening’ to democracy; major economic transformations...
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This paper reviews the literature on the forces driving urbanization in developing countries. It presents a model outlining how globalization can lead to the evolution of an urban structure which may approximate Zipf’s law. Policy implications are outlined.
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The paper presents a theoretical model that seeks to answer the question of why former squatter settlements tend to upgrade/redevelop at a slower pace than otherwise similar settlements originating in the formal sector. We argue that squatter settlers’ initial strategy to access urban land creates a...
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Population density gradients for South Africa's cities are quite small in absolute value, indicating a relatively flat population distribution across the cities. In contrast employment is less flatly distributed than the population. The relationship between employment densities and distance across...
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– Challenges and Opportunities
Many cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America face serious problems managing their wastes. Two of the major problems are the insufficient collection and inappropriate final disposal of wastes. Despite spending increasing resources, many cities – particularly in Africa and Asia – collect less than...
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Do local improvements in infrastructure provision improve city competitiveness? What public finance mechanisms stimulate local infrastructure supply? And how do local efforts compare with national decisions of placing inter-regional trunk infrastructure? In this paper, we examine how the combination...
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– A Comparative Approach for Innovative Urban Projects
Since the 1980s, the promotion of heritage values has gradually become a relevant issue for urban planning. Together with the emergence of new peripheries, inner-city areas and particularly old historic centres, affected by deterioration due to the recession of the last decades, have been the object...
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– Towards a Political Economy of Conflict in Cities
As the world moves towards its so-called urban ‘tipping point’, urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not...
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– Tracing the Role of Creolized Urban Ethnicity in Nation-State Formation
Dar es Salaam is exceptional in East Africa for having a record of relatively little ethnic tension, and remaining tranquil and true to its name, the ‘harbour of peace’. This paper explores the interface between ethnic and national identities in Tanzania’s capital city, focusing on its ethnic...
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– Reconstructing the Story of Sectarian Violence in Beirut
This paper aims at understanding the dynamics of sectarian violence in the city of Beirut, by looking at the early phase of violence in the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), and the process of dividing Beirut into various sectarian enclaves controlled by the warring militias. The paper aims to show the...
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– Longitudinal Results from Guayaquil, Ecuador
This paper examines the gendered nature of asset accumulation between 1978 and 2004 in Indio Guayas, a low-income community on the periphery of the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. In so doing, it emphasizes both the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative intra-household data, as well as...
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– Data, Measures, and Trends
This paper examines data on urbanization. We review the most commonly used data sources, and highlight the difficulties inherent in defining and measuring the size of urban versus rural populations. We show that differences in the measurement of urban populations across countries and over time are...
Displaying 47 of 47 results