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Africa's Informal Workers is a vigorous examination of the informalization and casualization of work, which is changing livelihoods in Africa and beyond. Gathering cases from nine countries and cities across sub-Saharan Africa, and from a range of sectors, this volume goes beyond the usual focus on household 'coping strategies' and individual agency, addressing the growing number of collective organizations through which informal workers make themselves visible and articulate their demands and interests. The emerging picture is that of a highly diverse landscape of organized actors, providing grounds for tension but also opportunities for alliance. The collection examines attempts at organizing across the formal-informal work spheres, and explores the novel trend of transnational organizing by informal workers. Part of the ground-breaking Africa Now series, Africa's Informal Workers is a timely exploration of deep, ongoing economic, political and social transformations

In April 2018, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy convened scholars, activists, policy advocates, community residents, and nonprofit workers to share and discuss research and action pertaining to processes of inequality in Los Angeles. We sought to shed light on the entangled structures of oppression, including urban displacement, housing precarity, racialized policing, criminal justice debt, forced labor, and the mass supervision and control of youth. Through keynote talks, group dialogue, and workshops, we analyzed how in Los Angeles, and elsewhere, black and brown communities face multiple forms of banishment and exploitation ranging from the criminalization of poverty to institutionalized theft.The question of racial banishment has been an important one for the Institute since its inauguration two years ago. This year though, amidst the troubled times of Trumpism, we wanted to shift our focus from banishment to freedom. In the reports that follow, you will find many examples of what Robin D.G. Kelley, a key presence at the Institute, has famously called "freedom dreams." Located in, and thinking from South Central Los Angeles, the event's participants provide insight into organizing frameworks and resistance strategies that challenge exclusion and refuse subordination. From tenant organizing to debtors' unions, from underground scholars to educational reparations, visions of freedom abound. The Institute on Inequality and Democracy is convinced that university-based research can, and must, support such freedom dreams. Such partnership – between the public university and social justice movements – requires careful attention to the difficult task of decolonizing the university. This mandate is evident throughout this collection of reports. There is no easy alliance between academic power and banished communities; there is no obvious solidarity between urban plans and freedom dreams. This event was intended to be a step towards building such alliances, especially by reconstructing the curriculum and canon of knowledge.

What roles do, can and should cities and their agents play on the international stage? Has the "rescaling" of political authority expanded urban governments' foreign policy space? Can the advocates of urban empowerment exploit cities' growing economic clout to harness urban development? To answer these questions, and to shed light on the international frontiers of metropolitan governance, this study explores the frictions between cities' foreign ambitions and states' collective efforts to preserve their sovereign rights and prerogatives. It proceeds in two parts: to probe the anarchical society's stake in the urban age, the first part maps the transnational activities of cities and their agents. It discusses urban aspirations, surveys foreign engagements and reviews their salience and limitations. To gauge states' collective response to the tentative expansion of metropolitan rule, the second part examines on what terms UN-Habitat, the Cities Alliance and the World Bank harness urban development in poorer and more fragile parts of the world. The study concludes with a critique of the view that international relations are bound to orbit local concerns. Adapted from the source document.

"Die Stadt entwickelt sich weltweit zum vorherrschenden Lebensort. Die Verstädterungsdynamik birgt vielfältige Entwicklungschancen. Gleichzeitig wachsen Armut und Umweltbelastung. Damit Entwicklungszusammenarbeit Erfolg hat, müssen auf allen staatlichen Ebenen des Partnerlandes, vor allem der lokalen Ebene, Impulse für Veränderungen gesetzt werden. Dieser Mehrebenenansatz ist ein besonderes Merkmal der deutschen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, neben integriertem Vorgehen, dem Aufbau lokaler Kapazitäten und der Wirkungsorientierung. Weltweite Kooperationen wie die 'Cities Alliance' gewinnen an Bedeutung. Gleichzeitig werden Erfahrungen genutzt, die Deutschland mit der kommunalen Selbstverwaltung und mit der Förderung benachteiligter Stadtquartiere gewonnen hat." (Autorenreferat)

The importance of political parties for inter-governmental differences in public policies has long been the subject of dispute. Given their comparative intentions and their concern with end-products rather than decision processes, statistical analyses of policy outputs should provide a valuable tool in evaluating this question. This they have seemingly failed to do, largely because they have devoted insufficient attention to the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of their investigations. However, with Sharpe and Newton's Does Politics Matter? a theoretical approach has been introduced into the local outputs literature which should herald a new era in comparative statistical investigations and the welcome emergence of conceptual and theoretical advances. In addition, their efforts raise the promise of forging a closer alliance between the outputs literature and more detailed, qualitative investigations of policy-making processes in individual local authorities.

Collective action against neoliberalism, & promoting a different model of globalization, has grown considerably in both the southern & northern hemispheres. This chapter considers how global issues affect civic & political life at the local level, looking at citizens' organizations in the British cities of Glasgow, Scotland, & Bristol, England, which differ considerably in their social & political histories & present states. The aim is to assess the extent to which globalization issues represent a distinctive set of policy interests for the organizations; translate into a distinctive set of collective actions; attract organizations with a distinctive profile; & may be associated with specific social movement dynamics. The study is based on interviews with 124 organizational representatives in Glasgow & 134 in Bristol. The findings indicate that mobilizations on global issues constitute the focal point of specific alliances, based on specific identity bonds in British civil society. While global issues are pervasive & distinctive, they are not equally appealing to the whole spectrum of civic organizations. Looking at how interest leads to action on specific events, participation in "global inequality" actions is positively correlated to interest in global issues & participation in local events on issues such as ethnicity. Differences between the two cities suggest that the embeddedness of actions on global issues is strongly mediated by the features of local civil societies & political systems. Tables. J. Stanton

ABSTRACT:The formation of industrial districts and the role that development played in shaping the pattern of American cities has become a standard for urban history. This has not been the case for Los Angeles. Despite its centrality for a metropolitan economy that has led California for a century and that today leads the nation in manufacturing employment, scholars and pundits have overlooked production in favour of consumption. Little is known about how firms, business associations and city officials created space for industry during the late nineteenth century when manufacturers' locational decisions contributed to spatial concentration in the city's core. A case study of the Cudahy Packing Company reveals why such sites were favoured, how a sectoral-specific district emerged and the processes through which Angelenos transformed a Yankee pueblo into an industrial city. Two factors, the local state's enablement of manufacturing via policy and regulation and the use of industrialization as an immigrant removal strategy, emerge as significant. Neither has been prominent in the literature on the growth of Los Angeles while the latter, the linking of race-ethnicity with land use, has been less prominent in prior studies of industrial districts.

Government intervention in Ur squatter settlements in Latin America, which is usually designed to integrate the squatter population, has tended to inhibit the participation of squatters in the improvement of living conditions. 3 forms of governmental control & intervention have been recognized: informal control through electoral alliances, control through government organizations, & government housing. The squatters are a power bloc to be contended with at election time & then ignored. Class action by the squatters is rare & is usually deflated through government administrative processes. Government housing to replace squatter settlements is usually deficient in several ways: inconvenient location, no room for expansion, little privacy, no integrated shops, & the cost to the settler. A case history of government intervention in Peru is given. The goal of Ur planning for a 'clean city' is impossible to realize in Latin America because of the economic forces related to migration. Changes might be effected if free land were available, if more & better building materials were produced, & if technical assistance from architects & engineers were available to the squatters as they worked on their own improvements. Modified HA.

This article examines the processes that culminated in the signing of an Agreement of Friendship between Manchester and Leningrad in 1962. The signing of such an agreement is both a civic level action expressing the aspirations of ordinary people and politicians within the two cities, but it must be placed within the context of developments in intergovernmental relations. This article examines the key actors in this process, the organisation of the process as well as the local, national and international factors that influenced it. Refs 50.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- About the Contributors -- Part 1 Setting the stage -- Chapter 1 Introducing the regional movement to transform America -- Chapter 2 From the Partnership for Working Families to PowerSwitch: Lessons and evolution from 20 years of anchoring affiliates -- Chapter 3 Why cities matter: Governing for the common good and reclaiming democracy -- Chapter 4 Regional power building today: A New New Deal revisited -- Part 2 The founders today -- Chapter 5 LAANE brain: Understanding the model and future of the Los Angeles alliance for a new economy -- Chapter 6 25 Years of Working Partnerships USA in San Jose -- Part 3 From (neo)liberal to progressive cities -- Chapter 7 Community labor united: Building bridges in Greater Boston -- Chapter 8 Aligning labor and community groups: The Alliance for a Greater New York -- Chapter 9 Building a bigger "We": Reflections on more than a decade of building community power in Pittsburgh -- Chapter 10 Racial justice is economic justice: Chicago's Grassroots Collaborative expands economic fairness by prioritizing racial equity -- Part 4 Storming conservative bastions -- Chapter 11 Transforming a conservative county: The development of the Center on Policy Initiatives -- Chapter 12 OCCORD: Organizing in conservative territory: if you can't win the game, change the rules -- Chapter 13 Georgia STAND-UP: Organizing for progressive power in the South -- Chapter 14 Stand Up Nashville: Shaping a narrative of equity and inclusion in the "It City" boom -- Chapter 15 Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy in Phoenix -- Part 5 Further Adaptions and Innovations -- Chapter 16 Adapting the model for a purple state: United for a New Economy in metro Denver.

People as infrastructure politics, a fruitful new analytic in urban political studies, has mysteriously been minimally studied in global north cities and their most punished places, America's rust belt environments. I chronicle a flourishing people as infrastructure politics in one American rust belt city setting, Chicago's neglected South Side. Here hundreds of subalterns participate in this resistance politics to reverse what I focus on: a commodifying blues club. Subalterns extract life-giving stuff from this space as they toil in Chicago's and the South Side's low-wage economies and marginalized communities. I show that this group's political acts and practices, guided by their ordinary space's interwovenness with taut political alliances and alternative ways to see, prove more sly and proactive than we have recognized. This slyness, first, entails an active use of a "back-path politics" as actions confront less club practices than the discursive content of practices. This slyness, second, leads with what I term resistive fragments: momentary, political charged interventions that powerfully resound across the club. The results suggest that this distinctive resistance politics is alive in America's rust belt cities, closely mirrors realities in global south cities, and is far more complex that we had previously known.

You hear a lot these days about "innovation and entrepreneurship" and about how "good jobs" in tech will save our cities. Yet these common tropes hide a stunning reality: local lives and fortunes are tied to global capital. You see this clearly in metropolises such as San Francisco and New York that have emerged as "superstar cities." In these cities, startups bloom, jobs of the future multiply, and a meritocracy trained in digital technology, backed by investors who control deep pools of capital, forms a new class: the tech-financial elite. In The Innovation Complex, the eminent urbanist Sharon Zukin shows the way these forces shape the new urban economy through a rich and illuminating account of the rise of the tech sector in New York City. Drawing from original interviews with venture capitalists, tech evangelists, and economic development officials, she shows how the ecosystem forms and reshapes the city from the ground up. Zukin explores the people and plans that have literally rooted digital technology in the city. That in turn has shaped a workforce, molded a mindset, and generated an archipelago of tech spaces, which in combination have produced a now-hegemonic "innovation" culture and geography. She begins with the subculture of hackathons and meetups, introduces startup founders and venture capitalists, and explores the transformation of the Brooklyn waterfront from industrial wasteland to "innovation coastline." She shows how, far beyond Silicon Valley, cities like New York are shaped by an influential "triple helix" of business, government, and university leaders--an alliance that joins C. Wright Mills's "power elite," real estate developers, and ambitious avatars of "academic capitalism." As a result, cities around the world are caught between the demands of the tech economy and communities' desires for growth--a massive and often--insurmountable challenge for those who hope to reap the rewards of innovation's success