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      • Trusted Partner
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        Geography & the Environment
        July 2024

        Living 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Geography & the Environment
        August 2020

        Urban 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        Globalized 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        Europeanisation as violence

        Souths and Easts as method

        by Kolar Aparna, Daria Krivonos, Elisa Pascucci

        The book offers a novel lens to situate Europeanisation as violence - through institutions and technologies of development, cultural heritage, and borders, among others - by bringing South and East within a relational frame. Through four inter-related sections, it foregrounds Europeanisation as infrastructural violence and colonial asymmetries, slow violence and the construction of stratified subalternities, epistemic dispossession, and border epistemologies.

      • Trusted Partner
        July 2023

        Urban Pest Management

        An Environmental Perspective

        by Partho Dhang

        The management and control of pests in the urban environment in the 21st Century faces many challenges. Pest populations adapt to changing conditions brought about by environmental changes caused by global warming, human population growth, and increased pollution. Urban pests are able to expand their ranges, densities, and habitats, sometimes causing large-scale damage and disease. This book provides collective insights from academic and industry experts on perspectives concerning urban pest management and regulatory innovations arising from the rapid onset of recent environmental challenges. Chapter topics address pest biology, advances in urban pest management practices, emerging urban pest control developments, new technologies, and regulations. The book describes new methods of pest control, their impacts on human health and the environment, and strategies for integrated management limiting the use of chemicals. It provides a practical resource for researchers and policy makers in pest management, urban health, medical entomology and environmental science. · An up-to-date and comprehensive resource on environmental urban pest management · Designed to appeal to pest control operators, public health professionals, and a range of field workers, as well as researching academics and graduate students · Brings both academic and industry experts together in one volume

      • Trusted Partner
        July 2021

        Gender, Climate Change and Livelihoods

        Vulnerabilities and Adaptations

        by Joshua Eastin, Kendra Dupuy

        This book applies a gendered lens to evaluate the dynamic linkages between climate change and livelihoods in developing countries. It examines how climate change affects women and men in distinct ways, and what the implications are for earning income and accessing the natural, social, economic, and political resources required to survive and thrive. The book's contributing authors analyze the gendered impact of climate change on different types of livelihoods, in distinct contexts, including urban and rural, and in diverse geographic locations, including Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. It focuses on understanding how public policies and power dynamics shape gendered vulnerabilities and impacts, how gender influences coping and adaptation mechanisms, and how civil society organizations incorporate gender into their climate advocacy strategies. This book: -Provides cutting-edge scholarship on an underrepresented area of climate change: the gendered impacts of climate change on livelihoods. -Covers a range of different types of livelihoods and geographic locations. -Involves contributors from a diverse array of cultural and scholarly backgrounds, bringing contrasting perspectives to the topic. This book is recommended for scholars, students, and practitioners who study or work in fields such as climate change, gender, livelihoods, public policy, economic development, and agriculture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        August 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2021

        African 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.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2024

        Intimacy and injury

        In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa

        by Nicky Falkof, Srila Roy, Shilpa Phadke

        Both India and South Africa have shared the infamy of being labelled the world's 'rape capitals', with high levels of everyday gender-based and sexual violence. At the same time, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege. Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies extended or limited these struggles. Intimacy and injury is a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, it provides new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.

      • Trusted Partner
        Science & Mathematics
        March 2022

        Key Questions in Urban Pest Management

        A Study and Revision Guide

        by Partho Dhang, Philip Koehler, Roberto Pereira, Daniel D Dye II

        Urban pests are common all over the world. These include cockroaches, flies, mosquitoes, bed bugs, ticks, fleas, ants, termites, rodents and others. These pests thrive in human structures, where there is food, warmth and places to hide. Urban pests are one of the leading causes of illnesses in humans due to allergies, bites, food contamination and phobias. They can also cause significant damage to property and structures. Knowledge and training in this field is vital for professional and trainee pest managers. This book is specifically intended to provide an aid to such candidates. The book contains 500 multiple-choice questions (and answers) grouped into the following major topic areas: · The history of urban entomology · Household pests · Cockroaches · Flies · Mosquitoes · Bed bugs · Termites · Sporadic pests · Stored product pests · Vertebrate pests · Pesticides and pesticide formulations · Handling pesticides · Integrated Pest Control Produced in a convenient format that can be used at any time in any place, the book allows the reader to learn and revise the subject and much more. Its structure allows the study of one topic area at a time, progressing through a simple introduction followed by key revision questions, many of which require students to use their practical knowledge. The answers to each of the questions are provided at the end with short explanations wherever appropriate.

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        May 2017

        Linking Urban and Rural Tourism

        Strategies in Sustainability

        by Susan L Slocum, Carol Kline

        Destinations rely on regional strategies to support and enhance the tourism product through regional partnerships and integration. Integrated tourism is defined as tourism that is explicitly linked to the economic, social, cultural, natural and human structures of the region in which it occurs. Integrated tourism has evolved to include numerous meanings and definitions but all of which have a vertical approach. The first of its kind, this book moves away from the vertical approach and provides insight into inclusive regional development strategies that support both the needs of urban and rural areas whilst enhancing the tourist experience, supporting the positive impacts of tourism and mitigating the negative. Regional studies tend to portray either an urban or rural focus without acknowledging that often these spaces constitute joint governance structures, similar historical and cultural roots, and economic dependencies. Sustainable tourism promotes sourcing locally, such as using rural agricultural products in urban tourism experiences. Furthermore, innovative marketing strategies linking tourism heritage, attractions, food and drink trails, and artisans with urban visitors are emerging. Including theoretical and applied research and international case studies, this will be a valuable resource to academics, students and practitioners working in tourism development and regional policy. ; This book provides insight into inclusive regional development strategies that support both the needs of urban and rural areas. Sustainable tourism promotes sourcing locally, such as using rural products in urban experiences, while innovative marketing linking tourism heritage, food and drink trails, and artisans with urban visitors are emerging.

      • Trusted Partner
        June 2021

        Words Kill

        by David Myles Robinson

        Famed reporter Russell Blaze is dead. It may have been an accident, but then again, it may have been murder. Russ' son Cody finds Russ's unfinished memoir for clues as to what may have happened. The opening words are: On the night of October 16, 1968, I uttered a sentence that would haunt me for the rest of my life. The sentence was, "Someone should kill that motherf***er.As Cody delves into the memoir, a window opens into a tragic past and thrusts the still-burning embers of another time's radical violence into the political reality of the present. History that once seemed far away becomes a deeply personal immersion for Cody into the storied heyday of Haight-Ashbury: drugs, sex, war protesters, right-wing militias, ground-breaking journalism-and the mysterious Gloria, who wanders into Russ' pad one day just to "crash here for a while until things calm down."Cody discovers aspects of his father's life he never knew, and slowly begins to understand the significance of those words his father spoke in 1968.Words Kill is a story of loss, violence, and racism; love, hate, and discovery. It is a story of then . . . and now.

      • Trusted Partner
        Science & Mathematics
        November 2020

        Urban Ecology

        Its Nature and Challenges

        by Pedro Barbosa

        This book provides a detailed examination of specific issues in urban ecology which are of great interest to professional ecologists, researchers, students and the general public. Written by a team of international experts the book presents a series of issue-based essays and assumes that urban ecology reflects the natural forces in effect in the habitats described and provides important, succinct, and informative introductions to critical topics. Examples of topics included are: Relative Success of Invasive Species in Urban vs. Non-Urban Habitats, Urban Habitats: Who Like Them More; Vertebrates or Invertebrates?, Unintended Consequences in Urban Habitats Compared to Non-Urban Habitats, Protecting Pollinators in the Urban Environment, Climate Change and Urban Environments, How Urban Conditions Influence Ecological Interactions.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2006

        The 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. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        The devil’s highway

        Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c.1850-1900

        by Brad Beaven

        Between 1850 and 1900, Ratcliffe Highway was the pulse of maritime London. Sailors from every corner of the globe found solace, and sometimes trouble, in this bustling district. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it harboured chaotic and dangerous 'exotic' communities. Sailortowns were transient, cosmopolitan and working class in character and provide us with an insight into class, race and gendered relations. They were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated and at other times clashed with one another. The book argues that despite these challenges sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban-maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2024

        The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

        Engaging in everyday struggle

        by Alexandrina Vanke

        Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

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