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Through an ethnographic exploration of everyday life infused with Marxist urbanism and critical theory, this work charts out the changes taking place in Muslim neighbourhoods in Delhi in the backdrop of rapid urbanization and capitalist globalization. It argues that there is an implicit materialist logic in prejudice and segregation experienced by Muslims. Further, it finds that different classes within Muslims are treated differentially in the discriminatory process. The resultant spatial ‘diversity’ and differentiation this gives rise to among the Muslim neighbourhoods creates an illusion of ‘choice’ but in reality, the flexibility of the confining boundaries only serve to make these stronger and shatterproof. It is asserted that while there is no attempt at integration of Muslims socially and spatially, from within the structures of urban governance, it would be a fallacy to say that the state is absent from within these segregated enclaves. The disciplinary state, neo-liberal processes of globalization, and the discursive practices such as news media, cinema, social science research, combine together to produce a hegemonic effect in which stereotyped representations are continually employed uncritically and erroneously to prevent genuine attempts at developing specific and nuanced understanding of the situation of urban Muslims in India. The book finds that the exclusion of Muslims spatially and socially is a complex process containing contradictory elements that have reduced Indian Muslims to being ‘normative’ non-citizens and homo sacer whose legal status is not an equal claim to citizenship. The book also includes an account of the way in which residents of these segregated Muslim enclaves are finding ways to build hope in their lives.

Based on observations and in-depth interviews, Border Lives tells the story of how diverse groups of individuals came to establish roots in Tijuana, beginning shortly after the termination of the Bracero Program (1942–64) and ending in the present. It describes how these different groups of migrants and residents adapt to a dynamic borderlands economy and draw on the border as a resource to construct their livelihoods. The book details the consequences of border-enforcement and immigration restrictions over several decades, documenting the ways in which policies create precarious situations for those who cross the border and come in contact with them on a regular basis. The book shows how individuals have used the border as a resource in the past, and how current residents are forced to seek ways to access the opportunities that the border offers in the future. Yet for all of these border crossers—former, current, and future—the border itself figures significantly, not only in their livelihood strategy but also in their lifestyle, shaping their knowledge, action, and their relationships, controlling their time, and allowing them to convert US wages into a Mexican standard of living, without losing the social and cultural comforts of Tijuana-as-home.

For a city in India’s northeast that has been embroiled in the everyday militarization and violence of Asia’s longest-running armed conflict, Dimapur remains ‘off the map’. With no ‘glorious’ past or arenas where events of consequence to mainstream India have taken place, Dimapur’s essence is experienced in oral histories of events, visual archives of everyday life, lived realities of military occupation, and anxieties produced in making urban space out of tribal space. Ceasefire City captures the dynamics of Dimapur. It brings together the fragmented sensibilities granted and contested in particular spaces and illustrates the embodied experiences of the city. The first part explores military presence, capitalist growth, and urban expansion in Dimapur. The second part presents an ethnographic account of lived realities and the meanings that are forged in a frontier city.

This book enlists some controversies that understanding, writing about and publishing on violence in Karachi entails. It brings into conversation some prominent academics—including anthropologists and political scientists—journalists, writers and activists. This diverse coalition provokes shifts away from recursive academic and media scripts of the city toward a different “counter-public” of cultural and political commentary, as the contributors critically unpack the constitutive relation of violence to personal experience and also seek to create new understandings that are tentatively shared. The approach to counterpublicking is organized around three overlapping schema. These are: social science and ethnography; epochal or historical transformation; and oral history and personal memoir. Drilling down into Karachi’s city neighborhoods, the chapters examine ways violence is textured locally and citywide into protest drinking, social and religious movements, class and cosmopolitanism, gang wars, the fractured lives of militants, press censorship and the effects on journalists, uncertain continuua between state political and individual madness, and ways the painful shattering of some worlds produces dreams of others. While the individual chapters each provide fresh insights, the collective ethics of rewriting, rethinking or cajoling Karachi’s landscape into other forms is more dynamic and unclear, and one being worked out in public. Chapters are by Nadeem F. Paracha, Laurent Gayer, Zia Ur Rehman, Nida Kirmani, Nichola Khan, Oskar Verkaaik, Arif Hasan, Razeshta Sethna, Asif Farrukhi, Kausar S. Khan, Farzana Shaikh, and Kamran Asdar Ali. Collectively, they comprise a singular and important contribution for all those spirited to understand what went wrong with Karachi.

Evidence-based, prevention-oriented, and community-driven approaches are advocated to improve public health and reduce youth behavior problems, but there are few effective models for doing so. This book advances knowledge about this topic by describing the conditions and actions necessary for effective community-based prevention. The chapters review the ways in which communities can promote readiness to engage in prevention among local stakeholders; build and maintain diverse, well-functioning prevention coalitions; conduct local needs and resource assessments; collectively decide on prevention priorities; select evidence-based interventions that are a good fit with prioritized community needs, resources, and context; and implement evidence-based interventions (EBIs) with fidelity and sustain them over time. The Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system is described in detail to illustrate effective community-based prevention. CTC is a coalition-based prevention system shown to promote healthy youth development and reduce youth behavior problems community wide. It does so by assisting communities to: (1) increase awareness of and support for EBIs; (2) encourage positive interactions between community residents and youth; (3) conduct local needs assessments and collectively decide on priorities to target with EBIs; (4) implement EBIs that are matched to prioritized needs; and (5) ensure that EBIs are coordinated across community organizations, implemented with fidelity, widely disseminated, and evaluated. The book describes the development and evaluation of the CTC system, including how its developers used community-based participatory research to ensure that CTC could be feasibly implemented and employed rigorous research methods to assess the degree to which use of the system reduced adolescent behavior problems.

This book blends critical theoretical insight with a historically grounded comparative study to examine the form, trajectory, and contradictions of redevelopment efforts following the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina disasters. Based on years of research in the two cities, the book contends that New York and New Orleans have emerged as paradigmatic “crisis cities,” representing a free-market approach to post-disaster redevelopment that is increasingly influential in our current, crisis-prone urban age. This approach, the book terms “crisis-driven urbanization,” emphasizes the privatization of disaster aid, devolution of recovery responsibility to the local state, and use of corporate tax incentives and grants to spur revitalization. Rather than target the populations and ecosystems most heavily impacted by the disasters, deregulated aid dollars subsidize luxury development and urban rebranding campaigns that accelerate gentrification and displacement and advance urban agendas long sought by growth coalitions, By exposing both the pre- and post-history of the two disasters, the book shows how long-neglected landscapes of risk and vulnerability combine with starkly inequitable redevelopment to turned sudden disaster into long-term crises. Such uneven and contradictory redevelopment only exacerbates risk of future crisis—and is not inevitable.

Digital nomads are knowledge workers who actively seek a lifestyle of freedom, using technology to perform their work remotely, traveling far and wide, and moving as often as they like. They have left their local coffee shops behind and now proudly post their “office of the day” photos from exotic locales, but what do their lives really look like? This book takes readers into an expatriate digital nomad community in Bali, Indonesia, and presents new manifestations of classic questions about community, creativity, and the role of place in the modern human ecosystem. It explains why digital nomads leave their creative class cities behind, arguing that creative class workers, though successful, often feel that their “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. This book follows nomads’ work transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote jobs. Then, it explains how digital nomads create a fluid but intimate place-based community abroad in the company of like-minded others. It shows why and how individuals blend in-person and online activity in their pursuit of community and freedom. This book provides insights into individuals’ efforts to live lives and create work identities that balance freedom, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age, and it provides insights into a larger cultural discourse about the future of cities, work, and community.

This book delves into the street-level experience of a set of African American and Latino teenagers and adults worried about or after them. It argues that the risks and opportunities associated with a poor urban neighborhood get filtered through smartphones and popular social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The book shows that street life in Harlem plays out on and across the physical street and the digital street among youth, neighborhood adults, and the authorities. Each chapter examines the parallels, differences, and crossovers between these two layers of social life that bear out the “effects” of a neighborhood. From roughly five years of firsthand research as an outreach worker and in other roles in the community, the author illustrates the online and offline experiences of girls and boys of color coming of age in the shadow of the Harlem Children’s Zone and sweeping gentrification when social media came to permeate all aspects of life. The Digital Street addresses the role of communication and technology in the transformation of an urban neighborhood.

What makes a city? Rather than a totality, a city is best understood through focusing upon different but interconnected spaces and processes that make for both dynamism and instability in human lives. Hence, the book ranges across a number of sites in order to explore their connections. How do the pleasures of the gated residential enclave encompass the pain of the demolished slum locality? How do localized rituals of suburban life incorporate the symbolic procedures of the nation-state? What processes link contemporary manifestations of consumerism, the middle classes, and the urban poor? What kind of a city is produced by the relationship between ‘illegal’ settlements such as ‘slums’, the traffic in fake documents that seek to stave of slum-demolitions and representatives of the ‘legal’ city such as Residents Welfare Associations (RWAs)? What can the increasing visibility of RWAs in the quotidian politics of the city tell us about new notions of citizenship and the emergent relationships between middle classes, the state and the market? And, what is shared between new forms of urban religiosity, the desire for a ‘global’ city and new consumer cultures? Through these key themes, the book examines the city as a series of overlapping meanings rather than as identifiable urban essence.

When cash-strapped local governments don’t provide adequate services, and planning policies prioritize economic development over community needs, what is a concerned citizen to do? In the help-yourself city, you do it yourself. The Help-Yourself City presents the results of nearly five years of in-depth research on people who take urban planning into their own hands with unauthorized yet functional and civic-minded “do-it-yourself urban design” projects. Examples include homemade traffic signs and public benches, guerrilla gardens and bike lanes, even citizen development “proposals,” all created in public space without permission but in forms analogous to official streetscape design elements. With research across 17 cities and more than 100 interviews with do-it-yourselfers, professional planners, and community members, the book explores who is creating these unauthorized improvements, where, and why. In doing so, it demonstrates the way uneven development processes are experienced and responded to in everyday life. Yet the democratic potential of this increasingly celebrated trend is brought into question by the privileged characteristics of typical do-it-yourself urban designers, the aesthetics and cultural values of the projects they create, and the relationship between DIY efforts and mainstream planning and economic development. Despite its many positive impacts, DIY urban design is a worryingly undemocratic practice, revealing the stubborn persistence of inequality in participatory citizenship and the design of public space. The book thus presents a needed critical analysis of an important trend, connecting it to research on informality, legitimacy, privilege, and urban political economy.

This book is about building credible science to address the challenge of criminal recidivism. It does so by drawing upon a unique natural experiment that presented an opportunity to witness an alternate reality. More than 625,000 individuals are released from prison in the United States each year, and roughly half of these individuals will be back in prison within just three years. A likely contributor to the churning of the same individuals in and out of prison is the fact that many released prisoners return home to the same environment with the same criminal opportunities and criminal peers that proved so detrimental to their behavior prior to incarceration. This study uses Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment for examining the question of whether residential relocation away from an old neighborhood can lead to desistance from crime. Many prisoners released soon after Katrina could not go back to their old neighborhoods, as they normally would have done. Their neighborhoods were devastated by a once-in-a-generation storm that damaged the vast majority of housing units in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina provided a rare opportunity to investigate what happens when individuals move not just a short distance, but to entirely different cities, counties, and social worlds. This study draws upon both quantitative and qualitative evidence to reveal where newly released prisoners resided in the wake of the Katrina, the effect of residential relocation on the likelihood of reincarceration through eight years post-release, and the mechanisms revealing why residential change is so important after release from prison.

Taking stock of the urban transport scenario in Indian cities, this is the first full-length study of the metro rail system in India. In recent times the metro rail has come up as a favoured alternative of mass transport in urban spaces faced with growing population, heightened vehicular traffic, and increased pollution. Using data, analysis, and first-hand information, this book tells the story of metro rail as proposed and undertaken across India — from Kolkata in the east and Mumbai in the west to Delhi and Jaipur in the north and Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kochi in the south. Focusing on the complexities of project planning and contrasting the Indian experience with those of its global counterparts, this volume distils important lessons for future infrastructure projects. While the metro rail system has considerably improved inter-city connectivity, the metro story in India is an ongoing one.

Despite India’s three decades of economic liberalization, access to quality education, well-paying jobs, and high standards of living align with prior class and caste advantages, leaving many poor and working-class people stuck in place and obligated to seek handouts from the rich. The study draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork at three private golf clubs in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, to explore the ties of dependence wealthy club members generate with the poor lower-caste golf caddies who carry their bags, and in a manner that reproduces their positions of privilege and authority. The caddies are not employees, and yet neither do they have complete control over their rates and schedules. Making $3–5 for a five- or six-hour round, caddies deploy acts servility and deference to yield additional money for healthcare, children’s school fees, and other household expenses. While a rare few caddies win sufficient support to put them and their families on a path of social mobility, most struggle to make ends meet, living in less-than-secure housing, going without food in some cases, and sending their children to low-quality schools that all but guarantee they will take up similar work as their fathers. The necessity but ultimate limitation of such relationships between the rich and poor underscores the failure of India’s development strategy, which favors private over public interests, and has yet to establish well-funded healthcare, education, and basic social services that would improve chances of social mobility and independence among the poor.

In rapidly urbanizing India, cities are places of conflict between people and nature. What is the future for conservation in Indian cities? Nature in the City examines the past, present, and future of nature in Bengaluru. One of India’s largest and fastest growing cities, Bengaluru was once known as the Garden City of India. The city’s ecology and environment have been degraded and destroyed in recent years. Yet nature still exhibits a remarkable tenacity. The book has a broad historical focus. Moving from early settlements in the 6th century CE to the 21st century city, it concludes by outlining a vision of a better future. The book draws on extensive research, integrated with stories of people, places, and examples of positive change. Detailed chapters demonstrate how nature has looked, behaved, and has been perceived differently in the home gardens, slums, streets, parks, sacred spaces, and lakes of Bengaluru. Nature in the city is shaped by human preferences and prejudices, as the book demonstrates. Of interest to local residents, visitors, and outside readers alike, the present volume provides an accessible, informative, and interesting tour of the social spaces where nature thrives and strives in Bengaluru. With heterogeneous environments, population densities, and urban poor, cities like Bengaluru must pay attention to the cultural and social contexts within which nature is embedded. The book further suggests an organic approach for urban conservation in the Indian context that builds on the capacities of people and communities, drawing on the close integration of the socio-cultural and ecological in urban India.

This book focuses on the city of Delhi, one of the largest mega-cities in the world, and examines—from a historical perspective—the processes of hybridization between cultures within its local architecture and urban planning from 1912, when the British Town Planning Committee for New Delhi was formed, to 1962, when the first Master plan was implemented. The research originates directly from primary documents and examines how and to what extent the city plans, the neighbourhoods, the types of residential, public buildings and the architectural styles have changed over time. The analysis of architectural elements, the city and its intricacies, is in itself useful to understand how foreign models were adopted, how much resistance was encountered, and how much adaptation there was to local conditions. The book establishes and demonstrates that Delhi has played an active role in the complex process of hybridization in both the pre- and post-Independence periods, developing its own character as opposed to merely accepting what was brought from abroad. Both periods have been characterized by a resilient and continuing compromise between indigenous and foreign elements and thus the post-1947 period cannot be construed as more ‘indigenous’ than that which preceded it. Delhi can be considered to be a comprehensive model or case study of the intermingling and conflict of cultures; its initial transition period, when the actual mega-city was born, gives an important starting point to critically investigate the current phenomenon of globalization.

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

Over the last century, New York and Los Angeles, America's two largest cities and urban regions, have constantly reinvented themselves in surprisingly ways. In the 1950s, central cities were viewed as declining due to flight of the suburbia-bound middle class. In the late 1990s, gentrification led to more and more sections of major U.S. cities being occupied by the wealthy, and after the 2007 financial and economic crisis, the momentum for gentrification has slowed. Today, the direction of New York and Los Angeles is highly uncertain, as uncertain as it has been for many decades. Drawing on a variety of perspectives—politics, culture, economics, and demography—this book provides new thinking and interpretations about the future of these cities. Chapters consider political, economic, social and environmental issues, including immigration, the effects of policing, trends in residential segregation, public education reform, and the effects of the economic crisis. The book examines the role of New York and Los Angeles, independently and together, as trendsetters and laboratories for the rest of the United States.

While Americans often believe that owning a home serves as a tool for building stronger communities and crafting better citizens, this book argues that these long-standing beliefs about the public benefits of homeownership are deeply mischaracterized. As owning a home has emerged as the most important way to build wealth in the United States, it has also reshaped the way citizens become involved in their communities. Rather than engaging as public-spirited stewards of civic life, the book argues that homeowners often engage in local politics as a way to protect their property values. This civic engagement, the book argues, contributes to the politics of exclusion. It keeps particular citizens from gaining access to high-opportunity neighborhoods and reinforces patterns of residential segregation. It often marginalizes renters from participation in public life, and it equates property values with the common good. Through an analysis of the politics of homeownership, this book asks readers to reconsider the power of homeownership to strengthen citizenship and build better communities.

This book presents an examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the United States. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is a detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975–78. Updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, this book deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.

Set against the backdrop of the capital’s history, culture, and socio-political scenario, this is a full-length study of the connection between rapid urbanization, rising crime, and law enforcement in Delhi. Providing an insider’s account of the evolution of policing in Delhi since the mid-19th century, the book closely looks at the patterns of policing in the ‘seven cities of Delhi’. From infrastructure constraints and related crime, crime against women and juveniles, terrorism to technology, the typology of criminals, and its trends in the process of the growth of the metropolis—the analyses demonstrates Delhi’s uniqueness as a metropolis and the attendant challenges. Aside from presenting different methods the Delhi police adopt to prevent crime, this book attempts to evaluate the successes and failures of these methods. While the rich historical records, statistical data, maps, and empirical surveys and observations brought together for the first time provide a wealth of additional information, the bibliography offers suggestions for the interested reader. Focusing on the challenges posed by over-urbanization and the changes in policing to counter them, the book draws out valuable lessons applicable in various degrees in other Indian cities.