Steering the Metropolis

by Inter American Development Bank, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Development Bank of Latin America

2017 · Inter-American Development Bank

A distinctive feature of urbanization in the last 50 years is the expansion of urban populations and built development well beyond what was earlier conceived as the city limit, resulting in metropolitan areas. This is challenging the relevance of traditional municipal boundaries, and by extension, traditional governing structures and institutions. "Steering the Metropolis: Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Urban Development,” encompasses the reflections of thought and practice leaders on the underlying premises for governing metropolitan space, sectoral adaptations of those premises, and dynamic applications in a wide variety of contexts. Those reflections are structured into three sections. Section 1 discusses the conceptual underpinnings of metropolitan governance, analyzing why political, technical, and administrative arrangements at this level of government are needed. Section 2 deepens the discussion by addressing specific sectoral themes of mobility, land use planning, environmental management, and economic production, as well as crosscutting topics of metropolitan governance finance, and monitoring and evaluation. Section 3 tests the concepts and their sectoral adaptations against the practice, with cases from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe.

Home Spaces, Street Styles

by Leslie J. Bank

2011 · Pluto Books

This book revisits the classic anthropology study - the Xhosa in Town series - based on research in the South African city of East London conducted during the 1950s. The original studies revealed that there were two opposed responses to urbanisation in East London's African locations, one embracing Westernisation, European values and Christianity and another opposed to it. Leslie Bank returned to the areas of East London studied in the 1950s to assess how social and political changes have transformed these areas, in particular the apartheid reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s and the struggle for liberation followed by the post-Apartheid period in the 1980s and 1990s. Bank has added important theoretical insights to this rich ethnography, and forged strong links with issues that transcend the particularities of his urban study.