This book investigates small cities - cities and towns that are not well known or internationally branded, but are facing structural economic and social issues after the Global Financial Crisis. They need to invent, develop and manage new reasons for their existence. The strengths and opportunities are often underplayed when compared to larger cities. These small cities do not have the profile …
Sub-Saharan Africa faces many development challenges, such as its size and diversity, rapid urban population growth, history of colonial exploitation, fragile states and conflicts over land and natural resources. This collection, contributed from different academic disciplines and professions, seeks to support the UN Habitat New Urban Agenda passed at Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016. It …
ABSTRACT Building Smart, Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure in Developing Countries contains the papers presented at the International Conference on Development and Investment in Infrastructure (DII-2022). The contributions cover a wide range of topics related to infrastructure issues on the African continent: Sustainable Infrastructure Development Smart Infrastructure and Cities Qu…
Cities are considered “engines of economic growth,” yet many cities in the global South struggle to increase productivity and provide significant economic opportunities for their growing populations. There is a need to deepen the knowledge on the links between public goods and services and equitable economic growth and how to support such processes, in policy and strategic terms, locally an…
Housing matters, no matter when or where. This volume of collected essays on housing in colonial and postcolonial Africa seeks to elaborate how and why housing is much more than an everyday practice. The politics of housing unfold in disparate dimensions of time, space and agency. Depending on context, they acquire diverse, often ambivalent, meanings. Housing can be a promise, an unfulfilled dr…
Making Room for People elaborates on preferences in housing. It explores how users, occupants, and citizens can express their needs, searching for the enhancement of individual choice and control over their residential environment, and the predicted positive spin-off’s for urban collectives. The central question is: What are the conditions under which an increase of people’s choice and voic…
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. A new wave of enthusiasm for smart cities, urban data, and the Internet of Things has created the impression that computation can solve almost any urban problem. Subjecting this claim to critical scrutiny, in this book, Andrés Luque-Ayala and Sim…
An in-depth look at the infrastructural landscape of Africa amid the third wave of urbanization, drawing on case studies from Africa and extending further afield. The Infrastructural South represents a major theoretical contribution to the study of infrastructure's role in the third wave of urbanization centered on Africa. Based on over a decade of empirical research, Silver's sweeping exami…
The bicycle in Victorian Britain is often celebrated as a vehicle of women's liberation. But much less is known about another critical technology with which women forged new and mobile public lives – cycle wear. Despite its benefits, cycling was a material and ideological minefield for women. Conventional fashions were vastly inappropriate, with skirts catching in wheels and tangling in pedal…