This volume emphasises the sociological view that cities are primarily about people, not places or buildings, and explores the social dynamics of urban space in globalising India. Distinguishing between ‘locale’ and ‘milieu’ and the community–cosmopolitanism dialectic in urban areas, it elucidates the thematic for urban sociology today. The chapters explore the various perspectives and processes in understanding the urban predicament in India today. The contributors specifically ask: What are the characteristics of the fastest growing cities in India? What are the forces shaping their forms and processes? Who benefits from what type of livelihood options cities offer? How have city administrations been dealing with mounting demands for housing, energy, and water resources, and problems of mass transportation? What implications do these have for the ecology of the city and the surrounding areas? Given the heterogeneity of urban populations, what social processes are at work and how they affect cit[y]zenship and identity? What aspirations and tensions are expressed among different groups, and what implications do these have for inter-group relations? What challenges do inter-group relations pose for urban planning and administration? The contributors include renowned scholars as also young researchers. They go beyond their disciplinary moorings of economics, history, political science, social work, and sociology, and their trans-disciplinary dialogues carry inputs from policy makers, administrators, and grassroots activists working in urban areas.

The Social Dynamics of Development

This book reports on the latest, cutting-edge scholarship on integrating social network and spatial analyses in the built environment. It sheds light on conceptualization and Implementation of such integration, integration for intra-city level analysis, as well as integration for inter-city level analysis. It explores the use of new data sources concerning human and urban dynamics and provides a discussion of how social network and spatial analyses could be synthesized for a more nuanced understanding of the built environment. As such this book will be a valuable resource for scholars focusing on city-related networks in a number of ‘urban’ disciplines, including but not limited to urban geography, urban informatics, urban planning, urban sociology, and urban studies.

Urban Dynamics in Black Africa presents a succession of worlds where we can study the development and the crystallization of major social change. The authors trace the development of former villages, towns, and colonial outposts into major cities within the international community. Open-air markets continue their trading beside modern department stores as individual Africans create contemporary lives from old and new. William J. and Judith L. Hanna, in this unique work, introduce new data and the methods of dependency theory, class and gender analysis; they offer connections between Africa's internal dynamics, its legacy of imperialism, and the international political and economic arena. At the same time, the book provides a model for studying the evolution of political institutions. Urban Dynamics in Black Africa illustrates how social classes modify and are modified by existing cultural forms. The book examines Africa in its independence by contrasting development and dependency, role adaptability and conflict, in a powerful conceptual matrix. Detailing the urban conditions that exist throughout Africa as well as their costs and benefits, this work shows how contemporary political conflict in urban Africa is based upon both ethnic and non-ethnic ties; and how these ethnic and non-ethnic ties serve as the bases of a system of political integration unique to poly-ethnic communities. As a synthesis of the relevant available knowledge on African towns and town-dwellers, this book is concerned primarily with the effects of external intervention and socioeconomic modernization upon the birth and development of Africa's new towns and the rapid expansion of its old ones. It considers the impact of migration and town life upon Africans. William J. Hanna is professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland. His research interests include international development, social planning and community planning. He is the author of numerous journal articles. Judith L. Hanna is senior research scholar in the departments of dance and anthropology at the University of Maryland. She is the author of numerous journal articles and books on the subject of dance.

Today, cities are being intensively reshaped by unexpected dynamics. The rise and growth of the digital economy have fundamentally changed the relationship between the urban fabric and its resident community, overcoming the conventional hierarchy based on production priorities. Moreover, contemporary society discovers new labour conditions and ways of satisfying needs and desires by developing new synergies and links. This book examines cultural and urban commons from a multidisciplinary perspective. Economists, architects, urban planners, sociologists, designers, political scientists, and artists explore the impact and implications of cultural commons on urban change. The contributions discuss both cases of successful urban participation and cases of strong social conflict, while also addressing a host of institutional contradictions and dilemmas. The first part of the book examines urban commons in response to institutional constraints from a theoretical point of view. The second and third parts apply the theories to case studies and discuss various practices of sustainable planning and re-appropriation in the urban context. In closing, the fourth part develops a new urban agenda as artists imagine it. This book will appeal to scholars interested in the social, economic and institutional implications of cultural and urban commons, and provide useful insights and tools to help local governments and policymakers manage social, cultural and economic change.

This book contains the contributions presented at the international workshop "The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems: an interdisciplinary approach" held in Ascona, Switzerland in November 2004. Experts from several disciplines outline a conceptual framework for modeling and forecasting the dynamics of both growth-limited cities and megacities. Coverage reflects the various interdependencies between structural and social development.

Monograph on urbanization and urban development in Africa - covers rural migration, urban sociology, living conditions, employment, interethnic relations, trade union functions, political problems, political participation, patterns of social change, future research, etc. Bibliography pp. 209 to 378 and statistical tables.