In March 2012, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) held the Subregional Workshop on Gender and Urban Poverty in South Asia to share experiences and enhance lateral learning among ADB and its project partners on addressing gender and social inclusion issues in urban development projects in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Participants included senior government officials, nongovernment organizations, community-based organizations, researchers, ADB urban and gender specialists, and representatives of international development agencies.This report presents the synthesis of knowledge, experiences, good practices, and recommendations shared at the forum with the aim of assisting ADB and its partner agencies in the planning of urban development projects to facilitate gender- and socially inclusive outcomes and reduce poverty in South Asia.

With its trans-historic and comprehensive annotated sources, this volume serves as a kaleidoscope through which the reader glimpses the shifting patterns of the private and the public lives of South Asian Muslim women and guides for further research and exploration.

Between 1991 and 2010, Dhaka’s population more than doubled to 15 million. Simultaneously, the city’s contribution to the national economy almost trebled. Clearly, population growth was accompanied by an unmistakable trend of economic growth, and a significant decline in urban poverty and income inequality. On the other hand, Dhaka’s high population density exacerbated serious environmental challenges, and it was soon ranked as one of the world’s least livable cities. In the context of these contradictory signals of rapid urbanization, Dhaka’s Changing Landscape sets to answer three most intriguing questions: Are the poorer segments of urban population, which migrate with dreams for better lives, benefitting from positive economic trends? Are these benefits sustainable? Are these benefits creating scope for this group to have a stake in the city’s growing prosperity? By studying 600 households and applying comparative analysis over a span of 20 years, the authors examine demographic and economic trends to understand the patterns, scale, and complexity of urban poverty, income inequality, and rural–urban migration. Going beyond the space and poverty debate, they enlighten the readers about the quality of life questions, sustainability matters, and gender and generational roles and relations necessary to understand qualitative transformation and migrants’ prospects for a better future.

Critical Reflections draws together the multi-disciplinary research of scholars working in/on cities across Southeast Asia. The fourteen essays collected in the volume are organised into three thematic sections: (re)conceptualisation, competition and intervention. Collectively, these reflections contribute to and interrogate the expanding urban and regional studies literature. The volume constitutes a critical corrective to the existing literature which all-too-often seeks to diagnose contemporary urban trends everywhere from a small number of, mostly Western, "paradigmatic cases". Yet, while acknowledging the increasing interconnectedness and shared global orientation of most cities in Southeast Asia, the volume is wary of positing an equally generalising regional model. Individually, these essays attend to the diversity of contemporary urban experiences in Southeast Asia.

Over the next 20 years, most low-income countries will, for the first time, become more urban than rural. Understanding demographic trends in the cities of the developing world is critical to those countries - their societies, economies, and environments. The benefits from urbanization cannot be overlooked, but the speed and sheer scale of this transformation presents many challenges. In this uniquely thorough and authoritative volume, 16 of the world's leading scholars on urban population and development have worked together to produce the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the changes taking place in cities and their implications and impacts. They focus on population dynamics, social and economic differentiation, fertility and reproductive health, mortality and morbidity, labor force, and urban governance. As many national governments decentralize and devolve their functions, the nature of urban management and governance is undergoing fundamental transformation, with programs in poverty alleviation, health, education, and public services increasingly being deposited in the hands of untested municipal and regional governments. Cities Transformed identifies a new class of policy maker emerging to take up the growing responsibilities. Drawing from a wide variety of data sources, many of them previously inaccessible, this essential text will become the benchmark for all involved in city-level research, policy, planning, and investment decisions. The National Research Council is a private, non-profit institution based in Washington, DC, providing services to the US government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The editors are members of the Council's Panel on Urban Population Dynamics.

The contributors respond to the absence of critical debate surrounding the ways in which spaces of the city do not merely contain, but also constitute, urban poverty. The volume explores how the spaces of the city actively produce and reproduce urban poverty.

This book offers essential insights into potential catastrophic events that might befall upon the emerging urban landscape in South Asia, and which are due to hazards, risks and vulnerabilities inherent in the region’s geophysical location, as well as due to climate change and unplanned urbanization. It highlights major physio-graphic, demographic, geological and geophysical indicators that are responsible for changing the pattern and trend of urbanization in South Asia – a crucial issue in view of emerging threats of climate change, and changes in the demographic profile. The book addresses the disaster management scenario in South Asia, manifestations of climate change in the region and various urban setups under climate-change-induced risks. Further, it elaborates on the challenges of urbanization-based neo-risks and vulnerabilities, which manifest in the form of slum area growth, piling and littering of waste and filth, new health risks, groundwater contamination, air pollution, highly energy-dependent lifestyles, poverty, socio-economic tensions, etc. It also critically examines the institutional mechanisms for disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA) and urban governance, and suggests appropriate changes in the governing structure to mitigate these risks. The book draws the attention of urban planners and policymakers to current shortcomings in the administrative and financial structures of local urban bodies. While outlining climate-associated risks and adaptation strategies in South Asia, it also suggests measures for integrating climate change and urban adaption with state's planning processes, and puts forward a risk alleviation platform to bring the risk managers working in different fields together, so that they make concerted efforts to achieve sustainable development. It offers valuable takeaways for researchers, urban planners, those working in industry, consultants, and policymakers.

This specialised Directory provides information on over 1 700 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) active in the field of habitat and urban development.

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Development provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for gender and development policy making and practice in an international and multi-disciplinary context. Specifically, it provides critical reviews and appraisals of the current state of gender and development and considers future trends. It includes theoretical and practical approaches as well as empirical studies. The international reach and scope of the Handbook and the contributors’ experiences allow engagement with and reflection upon these bridging and linking themes, as well as the examining the politics and policy of how we think about and practice gender and development. Organized into eight inter-related sections, the Handbook contains over 50 contributions from leading scholars, looking at conceptual and theoretical approaches, environmental resources, poverty and families, women and health related services, migration and mobility, the effect of civil and international conflict, and international economies and development. This Handbook provides a wealth of interdisciplinary information and will appeal to students and practitioners in Geography, Development Studies, Gender Studies and related disciplines.

This book explores the informal (political) patronage relations between the urban poor and service delivery organisations in Mumbai, India. It examines the conditions of people in the slums and traces the extent to which they are subject to social and political exclusion. Delving into the roles of the slum-based mediators and municipal councillors, it brings out the problems in the functioning of democracy at the ground level, as election candidates target vote banks with freebies and private-sector funding to manage their campaigns. Starting from social justice concerns, this book combines theory and insights from disciplines as diverse as political science, anthropology and policy studies. It provides a comprehensive, multi-level overview of the various actors within local municipal governance and democracy as also consequences for citizenship, urban poverty, gender relations, public services, and neoliberal politics. Lucid and rich in ethnographic data, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and students of social anthropology, urban studies, urban sociology, political science, public policy and governance, as well as practitioners and policymakers.