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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2023Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan
Young men and the digital economy
by Hannah Schilling
Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.
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Geography & the EnvironmentJuly 2024Living the urban periphery
Infrastructure, everyday life and economic change in African city-regions
by Paula Meth, Sarah Charlton, Tom Goodfellow, Alison Todes
The edges of cities are increasingly understood as places of dynamism and change, but there is little research on African urban peripheries, the nature of building, growth, investment and decline that is shaping them and how these are lived. This co-authored monograph draws on findings from an extensive comparative study on Ethiopia and South Africa, in conversation with a related study on Ghana. It examines African urban peripheries through a dual focus on the experiences of living in these changing contexts, alongside the logics driving their transformation. Through its conceptualisation and application of five 'logics of periphery', it offers unique, contextually-informed insights into the generic processes shaping urban peripheries, and the variable ways in which these are playing out in contemporary Africa for those living the peripheries.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2006The experience of urban poverty, 1723–82
Parish, charity and credit
by Alannah Tomkins
This comparative study of urban poverty is the first to chart the irregular pulse of poverty's encounters with officialdom. It exploits an unusual methodology to secure new perspectives from familiar sources. The highly localised characteristics of the welfare economy generated a peculiarly urban environment for the poor. Separate chapters examine the parameters of workhouse life when the preconceptions of contemporaries have been stripped away; the reach of institutional charities such as almshouses, schools and infirmaries; and the surprisingly broad clientele of urban pawnbrokers. Detailed analysis of the poor is achieved via meticulous matching of individuals who fell within the purview of two or more authorities. The result is a unique insight into the survival economics of urban poverty, arising not from a tidy network of welfare but from a loose assembly of options, where the impoverished positioned themselves repeatedly to fit official, philanthropic, or casual templates of the 'deserving'. This book will be essential reading for historians of English poverty and welfare, and eighteenth-century social and economic life. ;
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Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2025Demystifying informal urban design and planning
Insights from Asia
by Mahyar Arefi
Touting informal settlements or informality in general as illegal, crime-ridden, unsafe, filthy, chaotic, and formal developments as legal, orderly or safe, and so forth has not solved anything and informality as a way of life or an economic reality lingers and grows. Demystifying informal urban design and planning delves deeper into this conundrum and seeks to debunk some common misguided perceptions about it. Borrowing popular philosophical and political analogies from Isaiah Berlin and Gregory Treverton and others, it encourages urban designers and planners to become multitaskers like foxes rather than hedgehogs who can do one thing right. The book ends with some general takeaways on assuming more proactive roles in informal urban design issues and avoiding two potential pitfalls while interacting with them.
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2024Brave new city
Smart Cities - a survaillance-nightmare?
by Peter Schaar
The dream of the ideal city is as old as the city itself. Since real cities often develop chaotically, the idea of perfecting them, even tearing them down if necessary, and rebuilding them according to the prevailing patterns of thought is an obvious one. The latest manifestation of this utopia is the smart city - the intelligent city, packed with the latest technology and extensively digitised. But will air taxis and hyperloops, ubiquitous sensors, access control systems and data-driven management really make the city of the future a better place to live? Are they the answer to the enormous challenges facing today's fast-growing metropolises? Or will the supposed administrative paradise ultimately mutate into a digital juggernaut?
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Geography & the EnvironmentAugust 2020Urban transformations and public health in the emergent city
by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell
The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.
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The ArtsJanuary 2026David Simon's American City
by Mikkel Jensen
This book examines the television serials created by influential showrunner David Simon. The book argues that Simon's main theme is the state of the contemporary American city and that all of his serials (barring one about the Iraq War) explore different facets of the metropolis. Each series offers distinctly different visions of the American city, but taken together they represent a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in modern America. From deindustrialisation in The Wire and residential segregation in Show Me a Hero to post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme and the transformation of the urban core in The Deuce, David Simon's American city traces the urban through-line in Simon's body of work. Based on sustained analysis of these serials and their engagement with contemporary politics and culture, David Simon's American city offers a compelling examination of one of television's most arresting voices.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2006Rural Urbanism
London landscapes in the early nineteenth century
by Dana Arnold
This original and innovative book examines a period in with the development of London was perhaps at its most intense, for in the opening decades of the nineteenth century a concerted attempt was made to transform the metropolis into a modern European capital. For the first time the re-imaging of London is considered in relation to attitudes towards land, land ownership and the use of landscapes. The author contends that methods of land management and development and the associative values of landscape usually connected with rural environments, were in many ways equally applicable to country and city and formed essential components in the evolution of the metropolis. This study of London landscapes will be of relevance to a broad range of researchers, academics and those with a lively interest in architectural, social, economic and cultural history. ;
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Humanities & Social SciencesAugust 2024
The machinic city
Media, performance and participation
by Marcos P. Dias
As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.
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Humanities & Social SciencesOctober 2025Social democracy and the urban scene
Party responses to the diversifying centre-left
by Nik. Brandal, Øivind Bratberg
Social democratic parties struggle to appeal to a divided electorate. Particularly prescient is the clash between working-class voters thatare socially conservative and middle-class voters who are liberally inclined but economicallyleft. Are politics and policies that appeal to both even a possibility? Nowhere is thatdebate more acute than in European cities, yet in no other political space are answers more likely to be found.Where urban voters turn left, they are increasingly attracted by radical and green alternatives to social democracy.Social democracy and urban politicsdelves into the changing relationship between these three party families on the urban scene. Mapping electoral geography, governing strategies and the interface between parties and social movements on the left, the authors reflect upon the formation and dilemmas of a broader progressive alliance.
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Geography & the EnvironmentJune 2024Gendered urban violence among Brazilians
Painful truths from Rio de Janeiro and London
by Cathy McIlwaine, Paul Heritage, Miriam Krenzinger Azambuja, Moniza Rizzini Ansari, Eliana Sousa Silva, Yara Evans
This book aims to examine the nature of and resistance to gendered urban violence among Brazilian women in London and in the favelas of Maré, Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on the conceptualisation of translocational gendered urban violence framework, it highlights the importance of examining direct forms of gender-based violence across private, public and transnational spheres as interlinked with structural, symbolic and infrastructural violence. The book also explores the embodied and spatialised nature of gendered urban violence, explored through artistic engagements and arts-based methods. In developing a translocational feminist tracing methodological and epistemological approach across the social sciences and the arts, the book argues for the importance of a collaborative approach among academic, civil society organisations, artists and creative researchers with a view to engendering empathetic transformation to address gendered urban violence in the long-term.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2021African cities and collaborative futures
Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics
by Michael Keith, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, Susan Parnell
This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMarch 2017
The empire in one city?
Liverpool's inconvenient imperial past
by Sheryllynne Haggerty, Andrew Thompson, Anthony Webster, John M. MacKenzie, Nicholas J. White
From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, Liverpool was frequently referred to as the 'second city of the empire'. Yet, the role of Liverpool within the British imperial system and the impact on the city of its colonial connections remain underplayed in recent writing on both Liverpool and the empire. However, 'inconvenient' this may prove, this specially-commissioned collection of essays demonstrates that the imperial dimension deserves more prevalence in both academic and popular representations of Liverpool's past. Indeed, if Liverpool does represent the 'World in One City' - the slogan for Liverpool's status as European Capital of Culture in 2008 - it could be argued that this is largely down to Merseyside's long-term interactions with the colonial world, and the legacies of that imperial history. In the context of Capital of Culture year and growing interest in the relationship between British provincial cities and the British empire, this book will find a wide audience amongst academics, students and history enthusiasts generally.
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July 1990Comparative and Private International Law.
Essays in Honor of John Henry Merryman on his Seventieth Birthday.
by Clark, David
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November 1998The Biological Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective
Contributions to the Conference held in Munich, January 18–22, 1997, for the XIIth Congress of the International Economic History Association
by Herausgegeben von Komlos, John; Herausgegeben von Baten, Jörg
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2026
The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia
by Alexandrina Vanke
