Böcker i Cities and Society-serien

What are the consequences of staying in or moving out of a socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhood? In European urban sociology, research has mostly focused either on lower class ethnic minorities, or on white ethnic majority middle classes. This book fills by looking at upwardly mobile Turkish-Germans living in Berlin.

Contending that everyday sociability and social networks are central elements to an understanding of urban poverty, this book draws on detailed research conducted in Sao Paulo in an examination of the social networks of individuals who identify as poor.

Decentralization is accepted as one of the defining features of the third wave of democratic transitions in Latin America and commonly understood as an index and an agent of democratization. This book examines the relationship between global economic processes and decentralization.

We know very little about variations in urban class and ethnic segregation among nations. By emphasizing the importance of contextual diversity in the study of urban residential segregation, this book questions popular urban theories such as global city, neoliberal urbanism, and gentrification.

Researches the lives of gecekondu settlers in the capital city of Turkey in order to understand how households cope with poverty and why some households are more successful than others in reducing their deprivation. This book takes a critical stance towards conceptions such as household survival, livelihood and coping strategy.

This collection of field-based case-studies examines the role and contributions of AfricaΓÇÖs informal public transport (also referred to as paratransit) to the production of city forms and urban economies, as well as the voices, experiences, and survival tactics of its poor and stigmatised workforce. With attention to the question of what a micro-level analysis of the organisation and politics of informal public transport in urbanizing Africa might tell us about the precarious existence and agency of its informal workforce, it explores the political and socio-economic conditions of contemporary African cities, spanning from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam to Harare, Cape Town, Kinshasa and Lagos. Mapping, analysing and comparing the everyday experiences of informal transport operators across the continent, this book sheds light on the multiple challenges facing AfricaΓÇÖs informal transport workers today, as they negotiate the contours of city life, expand their horizons of possibility and make the most of their time. It thus offers directions for more effective policy response to urban public transport, which is changing fundamentally and rapidly in light of neoliberal urban planning strategies and ΓÇÿWorld ClassΓÇÖ city ambitions.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oslo, Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City offers an examination of gentrification from below, exploring the effects of this process upon city neighbourhoods and those that inhabit them, whether residents, business owners and their customers, or local activists. Engaging with recent debates surrounding immigration and the inclusion of ethnic minorities in the city, the book takes up the question of ethnicity and gentrification. It argues for an urban policy that gives up the preoccupation with policies concerning the residential mix and place transformation in favour of empowering its citizens. A lively and engaging analysis, in which theoretical rigour is illuminated with rich interviews and empirical content in order to shed light on the relationship between gentrification, displacement, and integration, Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, geography, anthropology and urban studies.

This collection of field-based case-studies examines the role and contributions of AfricaΓÇÖs informal public transport (also referred to as paratransit) to the production of city forms and urban economies, as well as the voices, experiences, and survival tactics of its poor and stigmatised workforce. With attention to the question of what a micro-level analysis of the organisation and politics of informal public transport in urbanizing Africa might tell us about the precarious existence and agency of its informal workforce, it explores the political and socio-economic conditions of contemporary African cities, spanning from Nairobi and Dar es Salaam to Harare, Cape Town, Kinshasa and Lagos. Mapping, analysing and comparing the everyday experiences of informal transport operators across the continent, this book sheds light on the multiple challenges facing AfricaΓÇÖs informal transport workers today, as they negotiate the contours of city life, expand their horizons of possibility and make the most of their time. It thus offers directions for more effective policy response to urban public transport, which is changing fundamentally and rapidly in light of neoliberal urban planning strategies and ΓÇÿWorld ClassΓÇÖ city ambitions.

By studying urban activism in Central and Eastern Europe, this volume argues that the recent resurgence of urban grassroots mobilisation represents a new phase in the development of post-socialist civil societies and that these civil societies have significantly more vitality than is commonly perceived. The case studies here reflect the diversity and complexity of post-socialist urban movements, capturing also the extent to which the laboratory of urban politics is richly illustrative of the complex nexus of state-society-market relations within post-socialism.

Cities can be seen as geographical imaginaries: places have meanings attributed so that they are perceived, represented and interpreted in a particular way. We may therefore speak of cityness rather than ''the city'': the city is always in the making. It cannot be grasped as a fixed structure in which people find their lives, and is never stable, through agents designing courses of interactions with geographical imaginations. This theoretical perspective on cities is currently reshaping the field of urban studies, requiring new forms of theory, comparisons and methods. Meanwhile, mainstream urban studies approaches neighbourhoods as fixed social-spatial units, producing effects on groups of residents. Yet they have not convincingly shown empirically that the neighbourhood is an entity generating effects, rather than being the statistical aggregate where effects can be measured. This book challenges this common understanding, and argues for an approach that sees neighbourhood effects as the outcome of processes of marginalisation and exclusion that find spatial expressions in the city elsewhere. It does so through a comparative study of an unusual kind: Sub-Saharan Africans, second generation Turkish and Lebanese girls, and alcohol and drug consumers, some of them homeless, arguably some of the most disadvantaged categories in the German capital, Berlin, in inner city neighbourhoods, and middle class families in owner-occupied housing. This book analyses urban inequalities through the lens of the city in the making, where neighbourhood comes to play a role, at some times, in some practices, and at some moments, but is not the point of departure.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oslo, Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City offers an examination of gentrification from below, exploring the effects of this process upon city neighbourhoods and those that inhabit them, whether residents, business owners and their customers, or local activists.