African Cities Through Local Eyes

African Cities Through Local Eyes
Author: Giuseppe Faldi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2021-10-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030849066

This book provides readers with a wide overview of place-based planning and design experiments addressing such powerful transformations in the African built environment. This continent is currently undergoing fast paced urban, institutional and environmental changes, which have stimulated an increasing interest for alternative architectural solutions, urban designs and comprehensive planning experiments. The international and balanced array of the collected contributions explore emerging research concepts for understanding urban and peri-urban processes in Africa, discuss bottom-up planning and design practices, and present inspirational and innovative co-design methods and participatory tools for steering such change through public spaces, sustainable services and infrastructures. The book is intended for students, researchers, decision-makers and practitioners engaged in planning and design for the built environment in Africa and the Global South at large.

Water Regimes

Water Regimes
Author: Dominique Lorrain
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 131721191X

In recent years the water sector has undergone profound institutional, economic and political transformations. Some countries have encouraged privatization of water services, but in many cases this has provoked adverse reaction to such a neoliberal and market-based approach to this common shared but essential resource. This book goes beyond the ideology of the public versus private water regime debate, by focusing on the results of these types of initiatives to provide better water services, particularly in urban settings. It provides numerous examples of alternative models, to show who is responsible for implementing such systems and what are their social, institutional and technical-scientific characteristics. Policies are analysed in terms of their implications for employees and residents. The book presents a new combinatory approach of water regimes, based on several international case studies (Argentina, Bolivia, China, France, Germany, India, South Africa and the USA, plus a comparison of three cities in Africa) presenting specific challenges for water models. These case studies demonstrate the successes and problems of a range of private sector involvements in the provision of water services, and provide examples of how small-scale systems can compare with larger-scale more technical systems.

Sustaining Urban Networks

Sustaining Urban Networks
Author: Olivier Coutard
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2005
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780415324588

Considering sustainability in its economic, environmental and social contexts, the contributors take stock of previous research on large technical systems and discuss their sustainability from three main perspectives: uses, cities, and rules and institutions.

Coproducing Water, Energy and Waste Services

Coproducing Water, Energy and Waste Services
Author: Luisa Moretto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1351238507

Conventional services, such as water, energy and waste services, have been for a long time physically networked and centrally managed. Today, this delivery model appears increasingly inefficient in two respects. It often fails in guaranteeing its financial viability and equitable service access, and and it generally draws heavily on the natural resources conveyed by these services. The book aims thus at exploring how service coproduction, based on public-community collaborations, can represent a valuable alternative to the conventional service provision model. Contributions in this book look into service coproduction and its relationship with the conventional service model both in the Global North (Germany) and Global South (Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Tanzania). They also address a variety of different perspectives in coproducing conventional services, such as the role of service modernisation, the variety of non-networked solutions, the relationship with the commons, just to cite some of them. Eventually, this book provides a first comprehensive exploration of the service coproduction theory in relation to conventional services, such as water, energy and waste. The chapters originally published as a special issue in Urban Research & Practice.

Urban Water Conflicts

Urban Water Conflicts
Author: Bernard Barraqué
Publisher: UNESCO
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9231041215

Urban water conflicts manifested first in Europe in the 19th century and are observed nowadays in various forms throughout the world; in particular, in developing countries. Main causes of these conflicts are characterised by complex socioeconomic and institutional issues related to urban water management. The debate about public water services versus private water supplies is frequently associated with conflicts over water price and affordability. On the other hand, the issue of centralisation versus decentralisation of water utilities is also often discussed in the context of institutional aspects of urban water management. These issues are intertwined and, thereby, a critical examination of socioeconomic and institutional aspects of urban water management in a holistic way is important for better understanding water conflicts in urban areas. Urban Water Conflicts - the output of a project by UNESCO's International Hydrological Programme on "Socioeconomic and Institutional Aspects in Urban Water Management" - presents a collection of essays on socioeconomic and institutional aspects of urban water management, focusing on water and sanitation services. The book examines interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and analysing conflicts that arise from inadequate urban water management. Conflict analysis is addressed in some essays by taking into account economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. The issue of institutional conflicts between different levels of government is also discussed in some case studies.

Small Towns and Decentralisation in India

Small Towns and Decentralisation in India
Author: Rémi de Bercegol
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-09-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8132227646

This book examines the impact that decentralisation reforms, initiated in the early 1990s, have had on small towns in India. It specifically focuses on small towns in Uttar Pradesh, one of the most densely populated and poorest states in India. Although considered home to one of the oldest urban civilisations, India remains one of the least urbanised regions in the world. At the same time, the country has many million-strong metropolises that are among the world’s largest megacities, as well as a multitude of small and medium-sized towns and cities. This paradoxical urbanisation, against a backdrop of reforms, has interested the scientific community to gain a more nuanced understanding of the changes and challenges involved. This book analyses an urban environment often overlooked by researchers and public authorities, namely, that of small towns. These towns are of vital importance as this is where the bulk of future urban development will take place. However, decades after implementation of the reforms, the majority of reviews and assessments have focused on large cities and so the impacts of the reform on small towns are still poorly understood. This book includes extensive primary data about political, technical and financial municipal issues in small towns of northern India and, is therefore, of interest to students, researchers and planners working on urban and regional studies in the global South.

Gouverner les villes d'Afrique

Gouverner les villes d'Afrique
Author: Centre d'étude d'Afrique noire (Institut d'études politiques de Bordeaux)
Publisher: KARTHALA Editions
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2007
Genre: Africa
ISBN: 2845868774

Cet ouvrage privilégie un objet - la ville et ses pratiques de gouvernement - en combinant les jeux d'échelles (globale, nationale et locale) et les jeux d'acteurs (publics/privés). Sont analysés ici les liens entre l'Etat et le gouvernement local autant que les relations des acteurs privés (individus, associations, syndicats, milices) avec les différents échelons de l'Etat. La ville est considérée comme un terrain d'expression des rapports de pouvoir entre des coalitions d'acteurs dont rend bien compte la multiplicité des secteurs analysés (services urbains, gestion des marchés et des gares routières, gestion foncière, politiques de propreté, plans d'aménagement, réformes institutionnelles, sécurité, gestion des héritages de l'apartheid). La diversité des terrains observés en Afrique de l'Ouest (Nigeria, Ghana, Guinée, Burkina Faso) et en Afrique australe (Afrique du Sud, Namibie, Zambie, Mozambique) montre l'impact inégal des politiques de décentralisation en ville, le poids relatif des normes internationales ainsi que la prégnance d'arrangements locaux labiles. La combinaison du temps court et de la moyenne durée permet d'identifier l'émergence ou non de nouveaux acteurs. Cet ouvrage est l'aboutissement de plusieurs programmes de recherche internationaux et d'enquêtes de terrains menés entre 2002 et 2004. Géographes, historiens, politistes, sociologues et urbanistes contribuent ensemble à une analyse pluridisciplinaire du gouvernement urbain en Afrique anglophone, francophone, et lusophone.

Subalterns and Social Protest

Subalterns and Social Protest
Author: Stephanie Cronin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134098103

The articles in this collection provide an alternative view of Middle Eastern history by focusing on the oppressed and the excluded, offering a challenge to the usual elite narratives. The collection is unique in its historical depth - ranging from the medieval period to the present - and its geographical reach, including Iran, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, the Balkans, the Arab Middle East and North Africa. The first to focus on the oppressed and the excluded, and their differing strategies of survival, of negotiation, and of protest and resistance, the book covers: both major social classes and sectors the working class the peasantry the urban poor women marginal groups such as gypsies and slaves Based on perspectives drawn from the work of the great European social historians, and particularly inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the collection seeks to restore a sense of historical agency to subaltern classes in the region, and to uncover ‘the politics of the people’.

States at Work

States at Work
Author: Thomas Bierschenk
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2014-01-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004264965

States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants.

The Redeployment of State Power in the Southern Mediterranean

The Redeployment of State Power in the Southern Mediterranean
Author: Sylvia I. Bergh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 113492724X

The effects of neoliberal economic reforms in the Southern Mediterranean are now widely regarded as a main underlying cause of the Arab uprisings. An often neglected dimension is that of the reforms’ implications for local governance. The contributions to this edited volume examine how state power is being re-articulated but also challenged at sub-national levels in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. They explore the effects of neoliberal economic and local governance reforms such as decentralization, public-private partnerships, and outsourcing in the area of public service delivery, poverty alleviation, and labor market reforms on local patronage networks, public accountability, and state-society relations. The findings show that such reforms are often subordinated to established patterns of political contestation among actors who seize on the opportunities that reforms offer to advance their political agendas, thereby illustrating the local specificity of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’. The book thus fills an important knowledge gap by combining public policy and management theories with those on patron-client networks and public accountability at the local level, and situating them within the critical literature on neoliberalism. This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.