Poverty and economic growth are intrinsically related but are not always synonymous. Human wellbeing is as important to economic growth as growth is to wellbeing. Poverty is multi-dimensional, encompassing both income and non-income related factors. Mobility, aspiration, dignity, respect, knowledge, information and savvy feature importantly in our understanding of the dynamics of poverty. This book brings together a collection of essays from around the world on urban development and poverty. The book reviews current international research in respect to some of the major themes that contribute to improving the equity and efficiency of urban systems. It bridges the need for a strong theoretical understanding of the issues with the demand for an equal understanding of practical application. Importantly, it explores and sets out methodologies for understanding qualitatively the dynamics of poverty and urban development.Organized into three parts, the book adopts as its principal theme poverty and the eradication of extreme poverty. Part 1: The Dynamics of Poverty and Urban Poverty Research, offers a framework for understanding poverty and a methodology for research. It identifies a range of broadly based, non-country specific themes in respect to the processes of urbanization, urban poverty and child poverty. Part 2: The Dynamics of Urban Systems, includes a selection of country specific essays each focused on an aspect of urban development and its relation to poverty. Each chapter offers first a theoretical overview in respect to its theme topic (shelter, land, partnership, migration), then explored in practice through case. Part 3: Urban Futures, reviews the principal themes emerging from the chapters and offers a basis for future work.Each part includes an introductory piece from a southern NGO in response to the question: "What kind of research would help you most in pursuit of your cause." In this way this book contributes to the process of ensuring that international academic research remains grounded and practical."

From the author of Small Change comes this engaging guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context. Drawing on four decades of practical and teaching experience, the author offers fresh insight into the complexities faced by practitioners when working to improve the communities, lives and livelihoods of people the world over. This titleshows how these complexities are a context for, rather than a barrier to, creative work.

The Placemaker's Guide to Building Community also critiques the single vision top down approach to design and planning. Using examples of successful professional practice across Europe, the US, Africa, Latin America and post-tsunami Asia, the author demonstrates how good policy can derive from good practices when reasoned backwards, as well as how plans can emerge in practice without a preponderance of planning. Reasoning backwards is shown to be a more effective and inclusive way of planning forwards with significant improvements to the quality of process and place. Nabeel Hamdi offers a variety of methods and tools for analyzing the issues, engaging with communities and other stakeholders for design and settlement planning and for improving the skills of all involved in placemaking. Ultimately the book serves as an inspiring guide, and a distillation of decades of practical wisdom and experience. The resulting practical handbook is for all those involved in doing, learning and teaching placemaking and urban development world-wide.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1. The Evolution of Development and the Placemakers' Tools – A Short Introduction Part 1: Place, Time and Clutter – Learning from Practice Reflection: Listening to Communicate 2. The Bad, the Good, the Ugly 3. Profiling Vulnerability Part 2: Placemaking and the Architecture of Opportunity Reflection – Getting Answers to Questions You Don't Ask 4. Toolkits 5. Knowledge 6. Participation in Practice 7. Interventions: Site Plans and House plans, Buffaloes and Mushrooms Part 3: Placemakers – Responsible Practice and the Question of Scale Reflection: The Invisible Stakeholder 8. PEAS: About Sociable Practice 9. Reasoning to Scale 10. Targeting Constraints 11. Learning and Communication 12. Reducing Dependency, Cultivating Ownership 13. Building Livelihoods Part IV: Teaching Reflection – The Mess of Practice 14. The Intervention Studio 15. The Placemakers Code. Notes and References

This book gives definition to participatory practice as a necessary form of activism in development planning for cities. It gives guidance on how practice can make space for big and lasting change and for new opportunities to be discovered. It points to ways of building synergy and negotiating our way in the social and political spaces 'in between' conventional and often competing ideals - public and private interests, top down and bottom up, formal and informal, the global agendas which outsiders promote and the local needs of insiders, for example. It offers guidance on process, designed to close gaps and converge worlds which we know have become divisive and discriminatory, working from the detail of everyday life in search of beginnings that count, building out and making meaningful locally, the abstractions of the global causes we champion - poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, resilience. Practice - the collective process by which decisions are negotiated, plans designed and actions taken in response to needs and aspirations, locally and globally - we will see, is not just about being practical, but more. Its purpose is to give structure to our understanding of the order and disorder in our cities today, then to disturb that order when it has become inefficient or inequitable, even change it. It is to add moral value to morally questionable planning practice and so build "a social economy for the satisfaction of human need." Practice in these spaces 'in-between' redraws the boundaries of expectation of disciplinary work and offers a new high ground of moral purpose from which to be more creative, more integrated, more relevant, more resourceful - more strategic.

This collection of 12 interdisciplinary essays explores topics central to the education of development professionals, in particular planners, urban designers, engineers and architects. How should education respond? Are today's approaches to research and teaching appropriate to the realities in the field? How best can students be equipped, technically, methodologically and intellectually? Why study in "developed" countries at all? These are some of the questions addressed by the essays in the light of changes in global, political and economic systems, rapid demographic changes, protracted ethnic conflict, and political and economic reforms. The text is divided into three sections, which together provide a comparative assessment of the issues from the perspective of developing countries: education on education; practitioners on practice and fieldwork; students on research methods, and the value of first-world education.

From the author of Small Change comes this engaging guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context. Drawing on four decades of practical and teaching experience, the author offers fresh insight into the complexities faced by practitioners when working to improve the communities, lives and livelihoods of people the world over. This title shows how these complexities are a context for, rather than a barrier to, creative work.

The Placemaker's Guide to Building Community also critiques the single vision top down approach to design and planning. Using examples of successful professional practice across Europe, the US, Africa, Latin America and post-tsunami Asia, the author demonstrates how good policy can derive from good practices when reasoned backwards, as well as how plans can emerge in practice without a preponderance of planning. Reasoning backwards is shown to be a more effective and inclusive way of planning forwards with significant improvements to the quality of process and place. Nabeel Hamdi offers a variety of methods and tools for analyzing the issues, engaging with communities and other stakeholders for design and settlement planning and for improving the skills of all involved in placemaking. Ultimately the book serves as an inspiring guide, and a distillation of decades of practical wisdom and experience. The resulting practical handbook is for all those involved in doing, learning and teaching placemaking and urban development world-wide.

Microplanning is a community-based process which enables local people to prepare and implement programmes for settlement upgrading. Local participants contribute to both the content and structure of programmes. Case studies from Chile and Sri Lanka.

* Explains how participatory urban planning can help poor people* Key advice for local authority workers on partnership working* Includes CD-ROM with detailed case studyThis book and CD-ROM explain how participatory urban planning strategies can help safeguard poor and vulnerable people. Based on a three-year project in Kenya and produced for people working in local authorities, this project offers guidance on understanding power relations and comparative advantage as a basis for deciding on partners, deciding the type of partnership in relation to project purposes, and assessing the advantages and risks associated with participation and partnership. In Part 1, the book explores the impact of urban poverty, the components of sustainable urban development, and the concept of urban governance. In Part 2, it provides advice on choosing partners, building partnerships, and action planning. The accompanying CD-ROM includes case study and project reports and the findings of an international workshop on this topic.This edition is a reissue of Partnerships in Urban Planning published with isbn 978 1 853396 090.

What exactly is 'small change'? Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it - that is the power of small changes that have huge positive effects. This book is an argument for the wisdom of the street, the ingenuity of the improvisers and the long-term, large-scale effectiveness of immediate, small-scale actions. Written by Nabeel Hamdi, the guru of urban participatory development and the master of the art, Small Change brings over three decades of experience and knowledge to bear on the question 'what is practice'?. Through an easy-to-read narrative style, and using examples from the North and South, the author sheds light on this question and the issues that stem from it - issues relating to political context, the lessons of the 'informal city', and the pursuit of learning that challenges convention. The result is a comprehensive, yet imaginative, guide to the forms of knowledge, competencies and ways of thinking that are fundamental to skilful practice in urban development. This is powerful, informed, critical and inspiring reading for practitioners in the field, students and teachers of urban development, those who manage international aid and everyone looking to build their community.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Design, Emergence and Somewhere In-between * Part I: The Setting * Street Work and Dev-talk: Who Controls the Truth? * Part II: Encounters in Practice * Departures and Arrivals * The Composting Bin: Looking for Starters * Power Points, Bullet Points and Waste Collectors: Learning from Precedent * Needs and Rights: Some Formal Planning * In Search of Community and the Structure of Place * The Bus Stop: Cultivating Community * Pickers, Sorters and Tap Attendants * The Pickle Jars * Part III: Learning Practice * Plan-Analyse-Survey: Planning From Back to Front * Governance and Networks: Organizing from Inside Out * Rigour and Relevance: It Can be Both * Playing Games - Serious Games * Index

This text presents a range of concepts and practical methods for housing with illustrative examples of actual projects, where resources are scarce, demand is high, urgency is acute, and where uncertainty is a way of life. The book shows that under these conditions, efficient practice depends upon methods that promote rather than hinder spontaneity, improvization, and incremental development.;The author explores what the changes taking place internationally in housing policy are, why and how they have emerged, and what impact they now have on design and on the attitudes, skills, methods, and tools of designers.;The book shows how plans can emerge in action without a preponderance of user surveys or master planning, and how the three themes of participation, flexibility, and enablement can together improve the efficiency of practice and promote an architecture of co-operation.

What exactly is 'small change'? Build a bus stop in an urban slum and a vibrant community sprouts and grows around it - that is the power of small changes that have huge positive effects. This book is an argument for the wisdom of the street, the ingenuity of the improvisers and the long-term, large-scale effectiveness of immediate, small-scale actions. Written by Nabeel Hamdi, the guru of urban participatory development and the master of the art, Small Change brings over three decades of experience and knowledge to bear on the question 'what is practice'?. Through an easy-to-read narrative style, and using examples from the North and South, the author sheds light on this question and the issues that stem from it - issues relating to political context, the lessons of the 'informal city', and the pursuit of learning that challenges convention. The result is a comprehensive, yet imaginative, guide to the forms of knowledge, competencies and ways of thinking that are fundamental to skilful practice in urban development. This is powerful, informed, critical and inspiring reading for practitioners in the field, students and teachers of urban development, those who manage international aid and everyone looking to build their community.

This book gives definition to participatory practice as a necessary form of activism in development planning for cities. It gives guidance on how practice can make space for big and lasting change and for new opportunities to be discovered. It points to ways of building synergy and negotiating our way in the social and political spaces 'in between' conventional and often competing ideals - public and private interests, top down and bottom up, formal and informal, the global agendas which outsiders promote and the local needs of insiders, for example. It offers guidance on process, designed to close gaps and converge worlds which we know have become divisive and discriminatory, working from the detail of everyday life in search of beginnings that count, building out and making meaningful locally, the abstractions of the global causes we champion - poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, resilience. Practice - the collective process by which decisions are negotiated, plans designed and actions taken in response to needs and aspirations, locally and globally - we will see, is not just about being practical, but more. Its purpose is to give structure to our understanding of the order and disorder in our cities today, then to disturb that order when it has become inefficient or inequitable, even change it. It is to add moral value to morally questionable planning practice and so build "a social economy for the satisfaction of human need." Practice in these spaces 'in-between' redraws the boundaries of expectation of disciplinary work and offers a new high ground of moral purpose from which to be more creative, more integrated, more relevant, more resourceful - more strategic.