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
Beyond neoliberalism: resilience, the new art of governing complexity
David Chandler – Resilience, as a framework informing governance, relies on an ontology of emergent complexity. This article analyses how complexity operates not only as a critique of liberal modes of … Continue reading
Can smart cities be equitable?
City planners have sometimes been accused of promoting digital conveniences that favor the rich and exclude the poor. But as cities around the world are already demonstrating, it is possible … Continue reading
What Can ‘Disruptive Urban Technologies’ Tell Us about Power, Visibility and the Right to the City?
If urban scholars are to go beyond an approach that addresses the creation of the technological city as a slash-and-burn approach, aiming to radically reorder the social in the mode … Continue reading
