While half the world’s city dwellers reside in small and medium-sized towns (United Nations, 2018), the urban social sciences remain stubbornly focused on the planet’s largest metropolitan areas. Among those studying the North, the global cities literature (Sassen, 2005, 2013) has re-energised the long-standing focus on cities such as London, New York and Paris. Neither has scholarship on the urban South, despite its critiques of urban theories emanating from Northern cities, turned its imagination much
beyond major metropolitan areas. The implicit assumption seems to be that megacities are representative samples of the massive
urban transformation underway across much of the world. The neglect of cities at the other end of the settlement size spectrum is not simply a failure of the academy to study the full universe of urban phenomena. As the evidence in this volume begins to demonstrate, it is actually a failure to grapple with one of the central forces underlying the rapid urbanisation unfolding in the
Global South: widespread rural-to-urban in situ transformations are resulting in the proliferation of small urban settlements.
Category Archives: Book review
Book Review: Subaltern Urbanisation in India
Book Review SUBURBIN Environment & Urb ASIA – 2018
By Khaliq Parkar
Environment & Urbanisation ASIA – 2018 – n°9/1, pp. 107-110
The challenges of urbanisation may be even greater in small towns
by Jayati Ghosh, The Guardian, Tuesday 2 October 2012
Global urbanisation has prompted a focus on megacities that overlooks the needs and vulnerabilities of smaller settlements.
Most of the policy discussion concerning global urbanisation has focused on megacities. And certainly, these huge and historically unprecedented agglomerations create a whole host of new requirements and vulnerabilities that have to be addressed creatively and equitably. But if we are too focused on this single issue, we may lose sight of another emerging problem likely to explode in the coming years.
Increases in urban population reflect three separate forces: the natural rise in population within urban areas; the migration of rural dwellers to urban areas; and, as settlements expand and become more densely populated, the reclassification of rural settlements as urban. All three forces have been at work to varying degrees. But where the third factor is significant, it creates a particular problem, because the administrative machinery for urban areas seldom exists for such settlements.
Book Review: Re-visioning Indian cities
This is a book review written by Julien Bordagi, PhD Candidate
Institut Français de Pondichéry – Avignon University (France)
The author exposed his reading of Re-visioning Indian cities: The Urban Renewal Mission book written by Sivaramakrishnan and edited by Sage Publications (2011).
The review sums up the main ideas introduced in the book and discusses some particular points.
Download here.