Cities and the political imagination
How can we recognize the political in the city? How might urban scholars engage with forms of urban politics outside of established sites of research such as those associated with … Continue reading
In Search of a Decolonial Urban Transformation
“We ask whether the WBGU report Humanity on the Move, as a major catalyst for urban sustainability science and agency, reproduces ways of thinking that could ultimately contradict the idea of … Continue reading
Cities Alive: Water for People
Cities Alive: Water for People presents an economic pathway of addressing the challenges of population growth and climate change in our cities. To move towards a more sustainable future, it is … Continue reading
Mapping Society (UCL free book)
From a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth century … Continue reading
Induced Demand – Linking roads and increased traffic
As the urbanist aphorism goes: Widening roads to reduce congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity. Yet nearly all freeway expansions and new highways are sold to the … Continue reading
On the Ways of Knowing and Understanding Informality
In the mainstream international development discourse, one often finds a general dualistic outlook in classifying the concept of (urban) informality, seen to be strikingly different from the formal, regulated economic … Continue reading
The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality
Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and … Continue reading
Local Governments Are Changing the World
Innovative governance is happening; governments are increasingly willing to grant autonomy for economic growth. Combine that with the profits that result from building cities; land values in Chicago, for example, … Continue reading
Informal economies around the world
This paper aims to present a comprehensive survey of the literature on the economics of informality. First, we focus on studies that aim to provide measures of informality using different … Continue reading
