Urbanization Without Cities

Urbanization Without Cities
Author: Murray Bookchin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1992
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

The city at its best is an eco-community. Urbanization is not only a social and cultural fact of historic proportions; it is a tremendous ecological fact as well. We must explore modern urbanization and its impact on the natural environment, as well as the changes urbanization has produced in our sensibility towards society and toward the natural world. If ecological thinking is to be relevant to the modern human condition, we need a social ecology of the city.

From Urbanization to Cities

From Urbanization to Cities
Author: Murray Bookchin
Publisher: AK Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1849354391

In this far-reaching work, social ecologist and historian Murray Bookchin takes the reader on a voyage through the evolution of the city. Cities are not just monumental social and political facts, they are tremendous ecological facts as well. Far from seeing them as an inherent adversary of the natural world, though, Bookchin uncovers a hidden history of cities as “eco-communities” that fostered diversity and interconnection, living in balance with and awareness of nature. Just as ecosystems rely on participation and mutualism, so must cities—and their citizens—rediscover these qualities, establishing harmonious, ethical social relations as a basis for a healthy ecological relationship to the natural world. Published for the one hundredth anniversary of Murray Bookchin’s birth, Urbanization Without Cities is the first in a series of his books that AK Press is reprinting and bringing to a new audience.

Global Urbanization

Global Urbanization
Author: Eugenie L. Birch
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2011-02-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812204476

For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. Much of this urbanization has been fueled by the rapidly growing cities of the developing world, exemplified most dramatically by booming megacities such as Lagos, Karachi, and Mumbai. In the coming years, as both the number and scale of cities continue to increase, the most important matters of social policy and economic development will necessarily be urban issues. Urbanization, across the world but especially in Asia and Africa, is perhaps the critical issue of the twenty-first century. Global Urbanization surveys essential dimensions of this growth and begins to formulate a global urban agenda for the next half century. Drawing from many disciplines, the contributors tackle issues ranging from how cities can keep up with fast-growing housing needs to the possibilities for public-private partnerships in urban governance. Several essays address the role that cutting-edge technologies such as GIS software, remote sensing, and predictive growth models can play in tracking and forecasting urban growth. Reflecting the central importance of the Global South to twenty-first-century urbanism, the volume includes case studies and examples from China, India, Uganda, Kenya, and Brazil. While the challenges posed by large-scale urbanization are immense, the future of human development requires that we find ways to promote socially inclusive growth, environmental sustainability, and resilient infrastructure. The timely and relevant scholarship assembled in Global Urbanization will be of great interest to scholars and policymakers in demography, geography, urban studies, and international development.

Cities for People, Not for Profit

Cities for People, Not for Profit
Author: Neil Brenner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2012-06-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1136625046

The worldwide financial crisis has sent shock-waves of accelerated economic restructuring, regulatory reorganization and sociopolitical conflict through cities around the world. It has also given new impetus to the struggles of urban social movements emphasizing the injustice, destructiveness and unsustainability of capitalist forms of urbanization. This book contributes analyses intended to be useful for efforts to roll back contemporary profit-based forms of urbanization, and to promote alternative, radically democratic and sustainable forms of urbanism. The contributors provide cutting-edge analyses of contemporary urban restructuring, including the issues of neoliberalization, gentrification, colonization, "creative" cities, architecture and political power, sub-prime mortgage foreclosures and the ongoing struggles of "right to the city" movements. At the same time, the book explores the diverse interpretive frameworks – critical and otherwise – that are currently being used in academic discourse, in political struggles, and in everyday life to decipher contemporary urban transformations and contestations. The slogan, "cities for people, not for profit," sets into stark relief what the contributors view as a central political question involved in efforts, at once theoretical and practical, to address the global urban crises of our time. Drawing upon European and North American scholarship in sociology, politics, geography, urban planning and urban design, the book provides useful insights and perspectives for citizens, activists and intellectuals interested in exploring alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist urbanization.

The Urbanization of People

The Urbanization of People
Author: Eli Friedman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231555830

Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship. The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services. Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.

Instant Cities

Instant Cities
Author: Gunther Paul Barth
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 1975
Genre: Cities and towns
ISBN: 0195018990

A reprint of the Oxford U. Press edition of 1975 with a new introduction (20 p.). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Cities and Stability

Cities and Stability
Author: Jeremy L. Wallace
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2014
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199378983

China's management of urbanization is an under-appreciated factor in the regime's longevity. The Chinese Communist Party fears "Latin Americanization" -- the emergence of highly unequal megacities with their attendant slums and social unrest. Such cities threaten the survival of nondemocratic regimes. To combat the threat, many regimes, including China's, favor cities in policymaking. Cities and Stability shows this "urban bias" to be a Faustian Bargain: cities may be stabilized for a time, but the massive in-migration from the countryside that results can generate the conditions for political upheaval. Through its hukou system of internal migration restrictions, China has avoided this dilemma, simultaneously aiding urbanites and keeping farmers in the countryside. The system helped prevent social upheaval even during the Great Recession, when tens of millions of laid-off migrant workers dispersed from coastal cities. Jeremy Wallace's powerful account forces us to rethink the relationship between cities and political stability throughout the developing world.

New World Cities

New World Cities
Author: John Tutino
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469648768

For millennia, urban centers were pivots of power and trade that ruled and linked rural majorities. After 1950, explosive urbanization led to unprecedented urban majorities around the world. That transformation--inextricably tied to rising globalization--changed almost everything for nearly everybody: production, politics, and daily lives. In this book, seven eminent scholars look at the similar but nevertheless divergent courses taken by Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Houston in the twentieth century, attending to the challenges of rapid growth, the gains and limits of popular politics, and the profound local effects of a swiftly modernizing, globalizing economy. By exploring the rise of these six cities across five nations, New World Cities investigates the complexities of power and prosperity, difficulty and desperation, while reckoning with the social, cultural, and ethnic dynamics that mark all metropolitan areas. Contributors: Michele Dagenais, Mark Healey, Martin V. Melosi, Bryan McCann, Joseph A. Pratt, George J. Sanchez, and John Tutino.

The Limits of the City

The Limits of the City
Author: Murray Bookchin
Publisher: Montréal : Black Rose Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1986
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780920057346