Category Archives: Other events

Aux frontières de l’urbain. Petites villes du monde

Appel à textes/call for paper

La revue Territoire en Mouvement prépare un numéro intitulé « Aux frontières de l’urbain. Petites villes du monde ». Volontairement ambiguë, cette formulation invite à questionner à la fois le thème des petites villes et celui des marges de l’urbain. L’objet de cette recherche est défini aussi bien « par le bas » que « par le haut », c’est-à-dire, par opposition classique au monde rural autant que par rapport aux grandes métropoles. En effet, ces dernières ont eu tendance à devenir une icône surmédiatisée de la ville. Mais, abstraction faite de ces organismes exceptionnels, qu’est-ce qu’une simple ville ? Constitue-t-elle un ensemble flou et transitoire ou représente-t-elle l’avenir d’une société urbaine ? L’appel à textes est proposé par François Moriconi-Ebrard, directeur de recherche au CNRS, UMR ESPACE (UMR 7300) et Cathy Chatel, post-doctorante au Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED) de Barcelone.

Rural-Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

Global Monitoring Report 2013:  Rural-Urban Dynamics and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

Friday, May 3, 2013
02:00 – 04:00 PM 
Room No.  HT- 1-300
The World Bank, Hindustan Times Building, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi
Presenter :
Jos Verbeek, Lead Author, Global Monitoring Report, World Bank

Discussants:  
Arun Maira, Member, Planning Commission, Government of India 
A S Bahl, Economic Advisor, Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India 
Dr. Amitabh KunduProfessor of Economics & Dean of School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
Aromar Revi, Director, Indian Institute of Human Settlements                

Moderator : 
Barjor Mehta,  Lead Urban Specialist, World Bank

Please disseminate to your external audiences 

For more information on the Global Monitoring Report, go to www.worldbank.org/gmr

(only for World Bank Staff)
Others please confirm through an email

      Key message of the GMR 2013:

In the past two decades, developing countries have urbanized rapidly, with the number of people living in urban settlements rising from about 1.5 billion in 1990 to 3.6 billion (more than half of the world’s population) in 2011. The report finds that urban poverty rates are significantly lower than rural poverty rates and that urban populations have far better access to the basic public services, such as access to safe water and sanitation facilities, even though within urban areas asymmetries in access are large. If the forces of urbanization are not managed speedily and efficiently, slum growth can overwhelm city growth, exacerbate urban poverty, and derail MDG achievements. As the GMR points out, however, people are located along a continuous rural-urban spectrum, and large cities are not necessarily places where the urban poor are concentrated. Smaller towns matter greatly for urban poverty reduction and service delivery. GMR 2013 calls for an integrated strategy to better manage the planning – connecting – financing formula of urbanization.

 

Asian Cities: Colonial to Global

Call for papers by IIAS

An investigation into how networks laid down during the era of Western colonial expansion in Asia have given certain cities a global edge

Deadline: 31 January 2013

‘Asian Cities: Colonial to Global’ is intended to be a multi-disciplinary seminar. Contributions are welcome from the fields of architecture, urbanism, geography, area studies, history, linguistics, religious studies, social science, anthropology, etc., but please remember that the point of departure will always be the built environment. Note also that this seminar is not intended to be an investigation into theoretical issues relating to the field of postcolonialism, rather it seeks to investigate more practical issues relating to the more literally ‘post-colonial’ (in the sense of the era following independence from erstwhile colonial or imperial powers), and the effects this has had on the built environment. Contributions are invited that cover the regions of East, Southeast and South Asia (including countries that were not colonized (such as Japan or Thailand) or were only partially colonized (such as China).

Urbanization beyond Municipalities

Somik Lall

joint with Tara Vishwanath, Nancy Lozano, Siddharth Sharma and Hyoung Wang

A seminar in the Frame of the CPR-CSH Urban Workshop Series

3:45 pm Tuesday, 26 July, 2011

Conference Hall, Centre for Policy Research, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi
This presentation will report on spatial and economic patterns related to India’s
urbanization and highlight challenges for managing key economic efficiency and spatial
equity tradeoffs. Economic liberalization in the 1990s has encouraged clustering of
businesses in the seven largest metropolitan areas – with considerable spillovers beyond
municipal cores of the largest cities into their immediate hinterland – including smaller
cities and even rural areas. However, with over 75 percent of the country’s urban
population and 95 percent rural population living beyond these metropolitan areas, it
becomes important to identify options for enhancing living conditions in places that
have not yet been picked by market forces while not undermining efficiency of India’s
metropolitan engines. This work is part of a series of prototypes being piloted under the
Urbanization Reviews, which seek to build a body of knowledge on urbanization
challenges and public policy implications in a variety of country settings.
Somik V. Lall is Senior Economic Counselor to the National Transport Policy
Development Committee and is currently on external service from the World Bank.
Somik has been a core team member of the World Development Report 2009:
Reshaping Economic Geography and has been leading the World Bank’s analytic work
on the Urbanization Reviews, designed to identify policy priorities at different stages of
urbanization. Somik’s policy advisory and analytic work has spanned a range of
countries including Brazil, Russia India, China and South Africa, focusing on
identifying priorities for public investment across places and sectors. His research has
been published in leading academic and policy journals. Somik holds a B.S. in
Engineering, Masters in City and Regional Planning, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy.