City Requiem, Calcutta

City Requiem, Calcutta
Author: Ananya Roy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2003
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816639335

Housing developments emerge amid the paddy fields on the fringes of Calcutta; overflowing trains carry peasant women to informal urban labor markets in a daily commute against hunger; land is settled and claimed in a complex choreography of squatting and evictions: such, Ananya Roy contends, are the distinctive spaces of a communism for the new millennium -- where, at a moment of liberalization, the hegemony of poverty is quietly reproduced. An ethnography of urban development in Calcutta, Roy's book explores the dynamics of class and gender in the persistence of poverty. City Requiem, Calcutta emphasizes how gender itself is spatialized, and how gender relations are negotiated within the geopolitics of modernity and through the everyday practices of territory. Thus Roy shows how urban developmentalism, in its populist guise, reproduces the relations of masculinist patronage, and, in its entrepreneurial guise, seeks to reclaim a bourgeois Calcutta, gentlemanly in its nostalgias. In doing so, her work expands the field of poverty studies by showing how a politics of poverty is also a poverty of knowledge, a construction and management of social and spatial categories.

Calcutta Poor

Calcutta Poor
Author: Frederic C. Thomas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315479230

Calcutta is notorious for its pavement dwellers, street children, and scavengers that have become a portrait of the worst sort of human degradation. In this illuminating critique, Thomas investigates the standard solutions - improved housing, increased job creation, and intervention of social services agencies - only to come to the conclusion that such initiatives have little effect on the inherent nature of the problem of poverty. Based on historical and anthropological findings, and the author's visits to the slums of Calcutta, what becomes clear is that even in the midst of great poverty, there is a nobility of character, a vitality of ethnic and cultural ties, and an energy that bring out inventiveness and ingenuity in the lives of the poor. If Calcutta's poverty is not to be an intractable problem, these internal forces must be awakened to generate solutions. Illustrated with stunning photographs, Thomas's reflections provide new insight into an age-old problem.

Kolkata — The Colonial City in Transition

Kolkata — The Colonial City in Transition
Author: Sumana Bandyopadhyay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2022-12-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000603717

This book explores the spatial characteristics of the city of Kolkata in India in terms of the physical, economic, social, political, and environmental aspects of urban geography, and focuses upon the inherent processes that impact its transformation. It discusses different facets of urban geography and highlights the contemporary challenges of a major primate city in South Asia, which represents the conflicts between the traditional and the modern, the rich and the poor, the skyscrapers and the shanties. With its detailed empirical research and mapping exercises based on real-time remote sensing data, the book offers an understanding of a range of contemporary urban issues. It examines the spatial consequences of urban sprawl, land-use changes, ecological crisis, climate change, critical disasters, dynamics of the peri-urban interface, neighborhood restructuring, debates around heritage conservation, housing poverty, gray spaces, governance and the political landscape of the city. This book will be useful to students, teachers, and researchers of geography, especially human geography and urban geography, urban studies, urban development and planning, regional planning, social geography, governance, ecology, economics, and South Asian studies. It will also benefit urban planners, development professionals, and those interested in the study of the city of Kolkata and its transformations.

Slum Habitat

Slum Habitat
Author: Council for Social Development (India)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 1991
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums
Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2007-09-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1844671607

Celebrated urban theorist Davis provides a global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.

The Asian City: Processes of Development, Characteristics and Planning

The Asian City: Processes of Development, Characteristics and Planning
Author: Ashok K. Dutt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9401110026

In The Asian City the Asian urbanisation processes, nature and characteristics of the 1990s have been analyzed by countries, by comparing different countries and in an international context. The authors are urban specialists from four continents. This volume has been divided into six parts: Part I Urbanisation in an international context; Part II Comparative urban setting; Part III Urbanisation characteristics by country; Part IV Urban planning; Part V The urban poor, and Part VI Perspectives on urbanization. This work allows the reader to understand Asian urban forms, their evolution, the nature of urbanisation, its impact on economic growth in cities, the living and working conditions of the poor, and urban planning and problems.

Perspectives on the World Christian Movement (4th Edition)

Perspectives on the World Christian Movement (4th Edition)
Author: Ralph D. Winter
Publisher: William Carey Publishing
Total Pages: 1315
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 164508194X

Perspectives on the World Christian Movement presents a multi-faceted collection of readings exploring the biblical, historical, cultural, and strategic dimensions of world evangelization. Writings from more than 150 mission scholars and practitioners (over 60 of them new to this edition) portray the history and anticipate the potential of the global Christian movement. Every one of the 170 articles and side bars offers practical wisdom enabling Christians to labor together in bold, biblical hope to finish the task of seeing that Christ is named and followed among all the peoples of the earth. The Fourth Edition contains over 60 articles and sidebars that are new to this edition. Many articles have been updated and revised.