Suchergebnisse

"Worlding Cities" is the first serious examination of Asian urbanism to highlight the connections between different Asian models and practices of urbanization. It includes important contributions from a respected group of scholars across a range of generations, disciplines, and sites of study. Describes the new theoretical framework of 'worlding'. Substantially expands and updates the themes of capital and culture. Includes a unique collection of authors across generations, disciplines, and sites of study. Demonstrates how references to Asian power, success, and hegemony make possible urban development and limit urban politics

This is a book about poverty but it does not study the poor and the powerless; instead it studies those who manage poverty. It sheds light on how powerful institutions control ""capital,"" or circuits of profit and investment, as well as ""truth,"" or authoritative knowledge about poverty. Such dominant practices are challenged by alternative paradigms of development, and the book details these as well. Using the case of microfinance, the book participates in a set of fierce debates about development -- from the role of markets to the secrets of successful pro-poor institutions. Based on many.

AbstractRecent assertions of urban theory have dismissed the value of postcolonial critique in urban studies. This essay draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate key flaws in such theoretical formulations. In doing so, it returns to the puzzle of how and why studying urbanism in the global South might matter for the reconceptualization of critical urban theory. Instead of a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation, the essay foregrounds forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization. What is at stake, the essay concludes, is a culture of theory, one that in its Eurocentrism tends to foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy. A concern with the relationship between place, knowledge and power—a key insight of postcolonial critique—might make possible new practices of theory in urban studies.

AbstractThis article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas —'subaltern urbanism'— which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes. Of these, the ubiquitous 'slum' is the most prominent. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self‐organization and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives to subaltern urbanism. It thus highlights emergent analytical strategies, utilizing theoretical categories that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment such as the megacity, the slum, mass politics and the habitus of the dispossessed. Instead, four categories are discussed — peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces. Informed by the urbanism of the global South, these categories break with ontological and topological understandings of subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces.Résumé Intervenant sur les aspects épistémologiques et méthodologiques des études urbaines, cet article cherche à comprendre et à modifier les modalités d'analyse et de représentation des villes des pays du Sud dans la recherche urbaine et, jusqu'à un certain point, dans le discours populaire. Pour ce faire, l'attention est portée sur une formation d'idées, 'l'urbanisme subalterne', qui vise la conceptualisation de la 'mégacité', avec ses espaces subalternes et ses classes subalternes. Parmi ceux‐ci, le 'taudis' (slum) omniprésent est le plus saillant. Contredisant les textes apocalyptiques et dystopiques sur ce lieu, l'urbanisme subalterne apporte des récits du taudis vu comme un cadre d'habitation, de source de revenu, d'auto‐organisation et de réflexion politique. Les écrits explicatifs dominants sur la mégacité sont ainsi mis en question de façon cruciale, voire radicale. Toutefois, l'article s'intéresse aux limites de l'urbanisme subalterne et à ses alternatives. Il met donc en avant des stratégies analytiques nouvelles, avec des catégories théoriques qui transcendent les métonymes habituels du sous‐développement comme mégacité, taudis, politique de masse et habitus des défavorisés. Quatre catégories sont présentées à la place: périphéries, informalité urbaine, zones d'exception et espaces gris. Reposant sur l'urbanisme des pays du Sud, elles dérogent aux conceptions ontologiques et topologiques des sujets subalternes et des espaces subalternes.

This special issue seeks to return the urban to the heart of planning theory. In doing so, it has three objectives. Firstly, it highlights particular urbanisms: how they are produced, lived and negotiated, from New York to Bogota. The articles thus draw attention to the multiplicity of urbanisms that constitute the contemporary world system, thereby disrupting the rather restricted analytics of global cities and world cities. Secondly, the articles pay careful attention to the forms of worlding at work in such urbanisms, demonstrating how the production of the urban takes place in the crucible of modernizing projects of development, regimes of immigration and governance and experiments with neoliberalism and market rule.Thirdly, this special issue seeks to explore the implications of such research and analysis for the field of ideas currently constituted as planning theory. How does the study of urbanisms allow a rigorous understanding of planning as the organization and transformation of space? How can planning theory make sense of seemingly unplanned spaces that lie outside the grid of visible order? In what ways is planning itself a worlding practice, such that models, best practices, expertise and capital circulate in transnational fashion, creating new worlds of planning common sense?