An essential guide for those dealing with the Cape Water Crisis and for general water saving in South and southern Africa, a notoriously water-scarce region.

Three provinces in South Africa have been declared national disaster zones because of drought. The way we think about water needs to change, and fast. This is especially true for those of us who have running water and flush sanitation piped into our homes. For millions of South Africans, water is already a precious resource that costs toil to collect and fuel to heat. Our middle-class expectations that water will gush steaming from our dozens of indoor taps 24/7 are going to look as bizarre to future generations as the spectacle of Cleopatra bathing in asses’ milk. Our Roman-orgy relationship with water is over.

This book will hopefully help to alleviate water panic and distress. A “can-do” compendium, it’s meant to be a guide, not prescriptive – not all solutions or tips are one-size-fits-all. Think of it as an ally in your fight to save water and part of your survival kit, along with the first-aid box; Valium for water-worriers.

Shine A Light tells the story of two women, Corrine and Ingrid, who at the onset seem worlds apart, separated by the deep chasm of South Africa’s dark history. But as they traverse one of the most dangerous communities in Cape Town in search of vulnerable animals, they discover they are more similar than they are different.

While the narrative winds its way along the troubled streets, it becomes clear how animals provide a unique platform for dialogue and, in turn, healing. Through Ingrid’s eyes, and in conversations with people who would never have otherwise spoken – gangsters, drug dealers and addicts – Corrine slowly begins to feel her perceptions waver when she learns that behind every broken animal is a broken human, and just because someone can speak, it does not guarantee them a voice.

Jonathan Jansen is the former Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State, with a formidable reputation for transformation and for a deep commitment to reconciliation in communities living with the heritage of apartheid. In this, Jansen’s most personal and intimate book to date, South Africa’s beloved professor contemplates the stereotypes and stigma so readily applied to Cape Flats mothers as bawdy, lusty and gap-toothed – and offers this endearing antidote as a praise song to mothers everywhere who raise families and build communities in difficult places.

As a young man, Jansen questioned how mothers managed to raise children in trying circumstances – and then realised that the answer was right in front of him in the form of Sarah Jansen, his own mother. Tracing her early life in Montagu and the consequences of apartheid’s forced removals, Jansen unpacks how strong women managed to not only keep families together, but raise them with integrity.

With his trademark delicacy, humour and frankness, Jansen follows his mother’s life story as a young nurse and mother to five children, and shows how mothers dealt with their pasts, organised their homes, made sense of politics, managed affection, communicated core values – how they led their lives. As a balance to his own recollections, Jansen has called on his sister, Naomi, to offer her own insights and memories, adding special value to this touching personal memoir.

Township Economy provides a unique insight into township informal business and entrepreneurship. It is set in the post-apartheid period, in the third decade of Africa’s democracy and draws on evidence collected from 2010-2018 in 10 township sites, nine in South Africa and one in Namibia. The book focuses on micro-enterprises, the business strategies of township entrepreneurs and the impact of autonomous informal economic activities on urban life.

The book is unique in approach and content. It looks at spatial influences at various gradients, from the city-wide level, to objects, to invisible infrastructure. The analysis examines the influence of power as a tool to dominate and control and thus constraint inclusive opportunities.

This captivating book will be of interest academic researchers, university students and specialists in business studies, urbanism, politics and socio-economic development.

A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low income populations. The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity.

Kasi is the South African term for the township – a teeming conurbation of homes and businesses, entertainment venues and social meeting places. GG Alcock uses the term KasiNomics to describe the informal sectors of Africa, whether they are in the township, a rural marketplace, at a taxi rank or on a pavement in the shadow of skyscrapers. Brought up in a rural Zulu community, GG has learnt and shares the lessons of African culture, language, stick fighting, lifestyle and tribal politics, along with shared poverty and community, which have prepared him for accessing the great informal marketplaces of Africa. He is uniquely placed to uncover the extraordinary stories of kasi businesses which not only survive but excel, revealing a revolutionary entrepreneurship which is mostly invisible to the formal sector.

KasiNomic Revolution is a story of kasi entrepreneurs on one side and, on the other, of great corporate successes and failures in the informal community. KasiNomic Revolution is at once a business book, and at the same time a deeply human book about the people and lives of rural and urban informal societies.

KasiNomic Revolution is about the lessons of marketing, distribution, culture and modernity in an informal African world.

As a child, Thabo Abram Molefe, along with his family, is impelled into the apartheid era tradition of rural to urban transition. Moving from a farm to a multi ethnic and vibrant township in the heart of Heidelberg, the birthplace of Eugene Terre’ Blanche’s AWB, proves to be both a challenge and an adventure as he works to evade the nickname that has followed him as a result: "maplazini", Sotho for a dumb country bumpkin.

Native Boy explores a young man’s complex relationship with identity and race, seen through the lens of township life. Moreover, it is about his journey to escape the socio economic trap of the apartheid regime to forever limit the black man to a life of hardship.

An instant Number One New York Times bestseller, Humans of New York began in the summer of 2010, when photographer Brandon Stanton set out on an ambitious project: to single-handedly create a photographic census of New York City. Armed with his camera, he began crisscrossing the city, covering thousands of miles on foot, all in his attempt to capture ordinary New Yorkers in the most extraordinary of moments. The result of these efforts was "Humans of New York," a vibrant blog in which he featured his photos alongside quotes and anecdotes.

The blog has steadily grown, now boasting nearly a million devoted followers. Humans of New York is the book inspired by the blog. With four hundred colour photos, including exclusive portraits and all-new stories, and a distinctive vellum jacket, Humans of New York is a stunning collection of images that will appeal not just to those who have been drawn in by the outsized personalities of New York, but to anyone interested in the breathtaking scope of humanity it displays.

Heartfelt and moving, Humans of New York is a celebration of individuality and a tribute to the spirit of a city.

Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict, Third Edition, Four Volume Set provides timely and useful information about antagonism and reconciliation in all contexts of public and personal life, from the interpersonal to the global. Building on the highly-regarded 1st and 2nd editions (1999, 2008), and publishing at a time of increasing conflict and violent behavior the world over, this book is an essential reference for students and scholars working in the social scientific study of peace and conflict, criminology, public policy and international relations, as well as for those seeking to explore alternatives to violence and share visions and strategies for social justice and change. Covering topics as diverse as Sexual Assault, Terrorism, Arms Control, Nonviolent Movements, Child Abuse, Folklore, and Political Assassinations, the Encyclopedia comprehensively addresses an extensive information area in over 250 transdisciplinary, cross-referenced and authoritatively authored articles.

In 2009, Chicago spent millions of dollars to create programs to prevent gang violence in some of its most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Yet in spite of the programs, violence has grown worse in some of the very neighborhoods that the violence prevention programs were intented to help. While public officials and social scientists often attribute the violence - and the failure of the programs - to a lack of community in poor neighborhoods, closer study reveals another source of community division: local politics. Through an ethnographic case study of Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, Wounded City dispells the popular belief that a lack of community is the primary source of violence, arguing that competition for political power and state resources often undermine efforts to reduce gang violence. Robert Vargas argues that the state, through the way it governs, can contribute to distrust and division among community members, thereby undermining social cohesion. The strategic actions taken by police officers, politicians, nonprofit organizations, and gangs to collaborate or compete for power and resources can vary block by block, triggering violence on some blocks while successfully preventing it on others. A rich blend of urban politics, sociology, and criminology, Wounded City offers a cautionary tale for elected officials, state agencies, and community based organizations involved with poor neighborhoods.

Religion and Community in the New Urban America examines the interrelated transformations of cities and urban congregations over the past several decades. The authors ask how the new metropolis affects local religious communities, and what the role of those local religious communities is in creating the new metropolis. Through an in-depth study of fifteen Chicago congregations-Catholic parishes, Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques, and a Hindu temple, city and suburban, neighborhood-based and commuter-this book describes the lives of their members and measures the influences of those congregations on urban environments. Paul D. Numrich and Elfriede Wedam challenge the view held by many urban studies scholars that religion plays a small role-if any-in shaping postindustrial cities and that religious communities merely adapt to urban structures in a passive fashion. Taking into account the spatial distribution of constituents, internal traits, and external actions, each congregation's urban impact is plotted on a continuum of weak, to moderate, to strong, thus providing a nuanced understanding of the significance of religion in the contemporary urban context. Providing a thoughtful analysis that includes several original maps illustrating such things as membership distribution for each congregation, the authors offer an insightful look into urban community life today, from congregations to the social-geographic places in which they are embedded.

Crime and gentrification are hot button issues that easily polarize racially diverse neighborhoods. How do residents, activists, and politicians navigate the thorny politics of race as they fight crime or resist gentrification? And do conflicts over competing visions of neighborhood change necessarily divide activists into racially homogeneous camps, or can they produce more complex alliances and divisions? In Us versus Them, Jan Doering answers these questions through an in-depth study of two Chicago neighborhoods. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork, Doering examines how activists and community leaders clashed and collaborated as they launched new initiatives, built coalitions, appeased critics, and discredited opponents. At the heart of these political maneuvers, he uncovers a ceaseless battle over racial meanings that unfolded as residents strove to make local initiatives and urban change appear racially benign or malignant. A thoughtful and clear-eyed contribution to the field, Us versus Them reveals the deep impact that competing racial meanings have on the fabric of community and the direction of neighborhood change.

Orwell's first work -- a sensitive and insightful description of the life of the working poor in Paris and the homeless in London. It is still very relevant today, and while aimed at the casual reader, it is of interest to the scholar and activist.

The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to people who cannot afford the high price of urban real estate. Within these urban spaces are public and social goods including roads, policing, transit, public education, and culture, all of which have been created through multiple hands and generations, but that are effectively only for the use of those able to acquire private property. Why should this be the case? As Margaret Kohn argues, when people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim - the right to the city. Political theory has much to say about individual rights, equality, and redistribution, but it has largely ignored the city. In response, Kohn turns to a mostly forgotten political theory called solidarism to interpret the city as a form of common-wealth. In this view, the city is a concentration of value created by past generations and current residents: streets, squares, community centers, schools and local churches. Although the legal title to these mixed spaces includes a patchwork of corporate, private, and public ownership, if we think of the spaces as the common-wealth of many actors, the creation of a new framework of value becomes possible. Through its novel mix of political and urban theory, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth proposes a productive way to rethink struggles over gentrification, public housing, transit, and public space.

American society has been long plagued by cycles of racial violence, most dramatically in the 1960s when hundreds of ghetto uprisings erupted across American cities. Though the larger, underlying causes of contentious race relations have remained the same, the lethality, intensity, and outcomes of these urban rebellions have varied widely. What accounts for these differences? And what lessons can be learned that might reduce the destructive effects of riots and move race relations forward?
This impressive, meticulously detailed study is the first attempt to compare six major race riots that occurred in the three largest American urban areas during the course of the twentieth century: in Chicago in 1919 and 1968; in New York in 1935/1943 and 1964; and in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles weaves together detailed narratives of each riot, placing them in their changing historical contexts and showing how urban space, political regimes, and economic conditions--not simply an abstract "race conflict"--have structured the nature and extent of urban rebellions. Building on her previous groundbreaking comparative history of these three cities, Janet Abu-Lughod draws upon archival research, primary sources, case studies, and personal observations to reconstruct events--especially for the 1964 Harlem-Bedford Stuyvesant uprising and Chicago's 1968 riots where no documented studies are available. By focusing on the similarities and differences in each city, identifying the unique and persisting issues, and evaluating the ways political leaders, law enforcement, and the local political culture have either defused or exacerbated urbanviolence, this book points the way toward alleviating long-standing ethnic and racial tensions.
A masterful analysis from a renowned urbanist, Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles offers a deeper understanding of past--and future--urban race relations while emphasizing that until persistent racial and economic inequalities are meaningfully resolved, the tensions leading to racial violence will continue to exist in America's cities and betray our professed democratic values.

Urban ethnography is one of the oldest traditions of American social science and has helped define how we think about cities and city dwellers since its inception in the early twentieth century. Renewed interest in urban poverty, the immigrant experience, and gentrification among the public and scholars alike has focused attention on qualitative methods in the social sciences, and the field of urban ethnography in particular receives more attention now than at any point since its inception. The Urban Ethnography Reader assembles the very best of American ethnographic writing, from classic works to contemporary research, and aims to present ethnography as social science, social history, and literature alongside its traditional place as methodology. In addition to an original introduction that highlights the importance and development of the field, Kasinitz, Duneier, and Murphy also provide introductions to each section of the book. The section introductions will cover the period's historical events and how they influenced the study of the city, the major themes and preoccupations of ethnography, what was happening in the social sciences as a whole, and how the excerpts chosen fit into the larger work in which they were originally published. A valuable companion to a wide range of courses on cities across the social sciences, The Urban Ethnography Reader captures the diversity, the historical development, and the continuing importance of the ethnographic approach to understanding American communities.

This study explores the dynamic relations between cultural forms and political formations in some urban cultural movements. The analysis is based on a detailed study of the structure and development of the London Notting Hill Carnival, widely described as Europe's biggest street festival. Started in 1966 as a small-scale, multi-ethnic local festival, it grew into a massive West-Indian dominated affair that over the years occasioned violent confrontations between black youth and the police. The carnival developed and mobilized a homogenous and communal West-Indian culture that helped in the struggle against rampant racism. The celebration is contrasted with other carnival movements, such as California's 'Renaissance Pleasure Faire'. Analytically, this is a follow-up to Cohen's earlier studies of the relations between drama and politics in some urban religious, ethnic and elitist movements in Africa. The conclusion focuses on the processes underlying the transformation of rational political strategies into non-rational cultural forms.

In the popular imagination, the Caribbean islands represent tropical paradise. This image, which draws millions of tourists to the region annually, underlies the efforts of many environmentalists to protect Caribbean coral reefs, mangroves, and rainforests. However, a dark side to Caribbean environmentalism lies beyond the tourist's view in urban areas where the islands' poorer citizens suffer from exposure to garbage, untreated sewage, and air pollution. Concrete Jungles explores the reasons why these issues tend to be ignored, demonstrating how mainstream environmentalism reflects and reproduces class and race inequalities. Based on over a decade of research in Kingston, Jamaica and Willemstad, Curacao, Rivke Jaffe contrasts the environmentalism of largely middle-class professionals with the environmentalism of inner-city residents. The book combines a sophisticated discussion of the politics of difference with rich ethnographic detail, including vivid depictions of Caribbean ghettos and elite enclaves. Jaffe also extends her analysis beyond ethnographic research, seeking to understand the role of colonial history in shaping the current trends in pollution and urban space. A thorough analysis of the hidden inequalities of mainstream environmentalism, Concrete Jungles provides a political ecology of urban pollution with significant implications for the future of environmentalism.

In the Americas, debates around issues of citizen's public safety-from debates that erupt after highly publicized events, such as the shootings of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin, to those that recurrently dominate the airwaves in Latin America-are dominated by members of the middle and upper-middle classes. However, a cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the Americas reveals that the people suffering the most from violence live, and die, at the lowest of the socio-symbolic order, at the margins of urban societies. However, the inhabitants of the urban margins are hardly ever heard in discussions about public safety. They live in danger but the discourse about violence and risk belongs to, is manufactured and manipulated by, others-others who are prone to view violence at the urban margins as evidence of a cultural, or racial, defect, rather than question violence's relationship to economic and political marginalization. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied. This edited volume seeks to counteract this pernicious tendency by putting under the ethnographic microscope-and making public-the way in which violence is lived and acted upon in the urban peripheries. It features cutting-edge ethnographic research on the role of violence in the lives of the urban poor in South, Central, and North America, and sheds light on the suffering that violence produces and perpetuates, as well as the individual and collective responses that violence generates, among those living at the urban margins of the Americas.

Questions surrounding 'race' as a spatial divider have come to the forefront of the political agenda, compelling us to revisit the debate on residential segregation. Drawing on the spatial analysis of changing dynamics in the ethnic geography of Greater Glasgow and qualitative research on the residential preferences of 40 South Asian households, this book enhances our understanding of settlement in the city. Understanding Processes of Ethnic Concentration and Dispersal documents new residential patterns, including South Asian suburbanisation in traditionally 'white' areas. Processes underlying both the changes and signs of sustained ethnic concentration are shown to be dynamic and complex. They encompass elements of choice, constraint and negotiations between the two, while also revealing a remarkable array of differentials such as class, status, education, age and culture.

Must the strip mall and the eight-lane highway define 21st century American life? That is a central question posed by critics of suburban and exurban living in America. Yet despite the ubiquity of the critique, it never sticks-Americans by the scores of millions have willingly moved into sprawling developments over the past few decades. Americans find many of the more substantial criticisms of sprawl easy to ignore because they often come across as snobbish in tone. Yet as Thad Williamson explains, sprawl does create real, measurable social problems. Williamson's work is unique in two important ways. First, while he highlights the deleterious effects of sprawl on civic life in America, he is also evenhanded. He does not dismiss the pastoral, homeowning ideal that is at the root of sprawl, and is sympathetic to the vast numbers of Americans who very clearly prefer it. Secondly, his critique is neither aesthetic nor moralistic in tone, but based on social science. Utilizing a landmark 30,000-person survey, he shows that sprawl fosters civic disengagement, diminishes social trust, accentuates inequality, and negatively impacts the environment. Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship will not only be the most comprehensive work in print on the subject, it will be the first to offer a empirically rigorous critique of the most popular form of living in America today.

Based on fieldwork in Malaysia, this book provides a critical examination of the country's main urban region. The study first provides a theoretical reworking of geographies of modernity and details the emergence of a globally-oriented, 'high-tech' stage of national development. The Multimedia Super Corridor is framed in terms of a political vision of a 'fully developed' Malaysia before the author traces an imagined trajectory through surrounding landscapes in the late 1990s. As the first book length giving an academic analysis of the development of Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Area and the construction of the Multimedia Super Corridor, this work offers a situated, contextual account which will appeal to all those with research interests in Asian Urban Studies and Asian Sociology.

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones?
In his important new book, Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day. The Supreme Court, in accord with the wishes of the Nixon administration, allowed the suburbs to lock nonresidents out of their school systems. City schools, whose student bodies were becoming increasingly poor and black, simply received more funding, a measure that has proven largely ineffective, while the independence (and superiority) of suburban schools remained sacrosanct. Weaving together court opinions, social science research, and compelling interviews with students, teachers, and principals, Ryan explains why all the major education reforms since the 1970s--including school finance litigation, school choice, and the No Child Left Behind Act--have failed to bridge the gap between urban and suburban schools and have unintentionally entrenched segregation by race and class. As long as that segregation continues, Ryan forcefully argues, so too will educational inequality. Ryan closes by suggesting innovative ways to promote school integration, which would take advantage of unprecedented demographic shifts and an embrace of diversity among young adults.
Exhaustively researched and elegantly written by one of the nation's leading education law scholars, Five Miles Away, A World Apart ties together, like no other book, a half-century's worth of education law and politics into a coherent, if disturbing, whole. It will be of interest to anyone who has ever wondered why our schools are so unequal and whether there is anything to be done about it.

Race and Real Estate brings together new work by architects, sociologists, legal scholars, and literary critics that qualifies and complicates traditional narratives of race, property, and citizenship in the United States. Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.

Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part because some people enjoy larger, more supportive or otherwise more useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in people's deliberate "networking" than in the institutional conditions of the colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in which they happen to participate routinely. The book introduces a model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain from their connections depends on where those connections are formed and sustained. It studies an unlikely case: the experiences of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional conditions of the centers-from the structure of their parents' associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick-up and drop-off times--many of these mothers dramatically increased their social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how much they gained depended on how their centers were organized. The daycare centers also brokered connections to other people and organizations, affecting not only the size of mothers' networks but also the resources available through them. Social inequality then arises not merely out of differences in skills or deliberate investments - as the conventional social scientific and political wisdom would have it - but also out of the differences in the routine organizations in which people belong. In addition to childcare centers, Small also identifies the social forces at work in many other organizations, including beauty salons, bath houses, gyms, and churches.

Norman Street is the first serious examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the country. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is an in-depth, detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975-78. Now updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, Susser deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.