Medellín, Colombia, used to be the most violent city on earth, but in recent years, allegedly thanks to its 'social urbanism' approach to regeneration, it has experienced a sharp decline in violence. The author explores the politics behind this decline and the complex transformations in terms of urban development policies in Medellín.

Medellín, Colombia, used to be the most violent city on earth, but in recent years, allegedly thanks to its 'social urbanism' approach to regeneration, it has experienced a sharp decline in violence. The author explores the politics behind this decline and the complex transformations in terms of urban development policies in Medellín.

For the first time in history, the majority of the world's population lives in cities, the result of a rapid process of urbanization that started in the second half of the twentieth century. 'Megacities' around the world are rapidly becoming the scene for deprivation, especially in the global South, and the urban excluded face the brunt of what in many cases seems like low-intensity warfare. Featuring case studies from across the globe, including Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Megacities examines recent worldwide trends in poverty and social exclusion, urban violence and politics, and links these to the challenges faced by policy-makers and practitioners.

This book serves as a critical review of SOCIAL URBANISM, defined as a socio-political and practical approach to urban globalization, deriving from a planning strategy and portfolio of built projects that seek to alleviate the social consequences of urbanization. This book emphasizes both the political processes and the urbanism projects that simultaneously consider socio-economic and ecological components of space, and which highlight a greater focus on social sustainability. In a context in which geography defines space and culture, and through challenges of a global magnitude, we are inextricably united in an era of environmental uncertainty, where shared experiences and values place us within a collective culture, inspiring mutual agency in service of this vision for SOCIAL URBANISM. Through the work presented here, SOCIAL URBANISM is expanded as a worldview that considers the cultural values of a given place as interconnected to the geographical landscape of the region, and therefore, as the driving forces behind future models of globalization and urban growth. The points of view of multiple colleagues and experts across differing fields provide introspection on the implementation of SOCIAL URBANISM. These shared opinions strengthen the significance of this work and affirm the joint values and visions for the global urbanization challenges we are confronting in the 21st century, and which continue into the future.

"Anderson's work of urban geography is centered in ethnographic work undertaken on a single street in Clinton/Hell's Kitchen in New York City. At one time a site of disinvestment, the street is now rapidly gentrifying, and Miller examines the everyday strategies of residents to preserve the "quality of life" of their neighborhood, to define and maintain their values of urban living. Residents pick up litter, call the 311 hotline to report minor concerns, and form a block association to hire a private security firm to monitor the local public park. Anderson's broader agenda is to show how processes such as "investment" and "gentrification" are constructed out of the aggregate actions of ordinary people, and thus can be the sites of critique and intervention"--

The most violent places in the world today are not at war. They are instead buckling under a maelstrom of gangs, organized crime, political conflict, corruption, and state brutality. Such devastating violence can feel hopeless, yet some places—from Colombia to the Republic of Georgia—have been able to recover. Taking on existing literature and popular theories about war, crime, and foreign intervention, A Savage Order is a blistering yet inspiring investigation into what makes some countries peaceful and others war zones, and a blueprint for what we can do to help. Drawing on fifteen years of study and firsthand field research—interviewing generals, former guerrillas, activists, politicians, and law enforcement in countries around the world—Rachel Kleinfeld tells the stories of societies, including our own, that successfully fought seemingly ingrained violence and offers penetrating conclusions about what must be done to build governments that are able to protect the lives of their citizens.

While cities often act as the engines of economic growth for developing countries, they are also frequently the site of growing violence, poverty, and inequality. Yet, social theory, largely developed and tested in the Global North, is often inadequate in tackling the realities of life in the dangerous parts of cities in the Global South. Drawing on the findings of an ambitious five-year, 15-project research programme, Social Theories of Urban Violence in the Global South offers a uniquely Southern perspective on the violence–poverty–inequalities dynamics in cities of the Global South. Through their research, urban violence experts based in low- and middle-income countries demonstrate how "urban violence" means different things to different people in different places. While some researchers adopt or adapt existing theoretical and conceptual frameworks, others develop and test new theories, each interpreting and operationalizing the concept of urban violence in the particular context in which they work. In particular, the book highlights the links between urban violence, poverty, and inequalities based on income, class, gender, and other social cleavages. Providing important new perspectives from the Global South, this book will be of interest to policymakers, academics, and students with an interest in violence and exclusion in the cities of developing countries.

During the last decade, the South American continent has seen a strong push for transnational integration, initiated by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who (with the endorsement of eleven other nations) spearheaded the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a comprehensive energy, transport, and communications network. The most aggressive transcontinental integration project ever planned for South America, the initiative systematically deploys ten east-west infrastructural corridors, enhancing economic development but raising important questions about the polarizing effect of pitting regional needs against the colossal processes of resource extraction. Providing much-needed historical contextualization to IIRSA’s agenda, Beyond the City ties together a series of spatial models and offers a survey of regional strategies in five case studies of often overlooked sites built outside the traditional South American urban constructs. Implementing the term “resource extraction urbanism,” the architect and urbanist Felipe Correa takes us from Brazil’s nineteenth-century regional capital city of Belo Horizonte to the experimental, circular, “temporary” city of Vila Piloto in Três Lagoas. In Chile, he surveys the mining town of María Elena. In Venezuela, he explores petrochemical encampments at Judibana and El Tablazo, as well as new industrial frontiers at Ciudad Guayana. The result is both a cautionary tale, bringing to light a history of societies that were “inscribed” and administered, and a perceptive examination of the agency of architecture and urban planning in shaping South American lives.

This book explores violence in the public lives of modern Middle Eastern cities, approaching violence as an individual and collective experience, a historical event, and an urban process. Violence and the city coexist in a complicated dialogue, and critical consideration of the city offers an important way to understand the transformative powers of violence—its ability to redraw the boundaries of urban life, to create and divide communities, and to affect the ruling strategies of local elites, governments, and transnational political players. The essays included in this volume reflect the diversity of Middle Eastern urbanism from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, from the capitals of Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad to the provincial towns of Jeddah, Nablus, and Basra and the oil settlements of Dhahran and Abadan. In reconstructing the violent pasts of cities, new vistas on modern Middle Eastern history are opened, offering alternative and complementary perspectives to the making and unmaking of empires, nations, and states. Given the crucial importance of urban centers in shaping the Middle East in the modern era, and the ongoing potential of public histories to foster dialogue and reconciliation, this volume is both critical and timely.

Warfare in the twenty-first century goes well beyond conventional armies and nation-states. In a world of diffuse conflicts taking place across sprawling cities, war has become fragmented and uneven to match its settings. Yet the analysis of failed states, civil war, and state building rarely considers the city, rather than the country, as the terrain of battle. In Cities at War, Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen assemble an international team of scholars to examine cities as sites of contemporary warfare and insecurity. Reflecting Kaldor’s expertise on security cultures and Sassen’s perspective on cities and their geographies, they develop new insight into how cities and their residents encounter instability and conflict, as well as the ways in which urban forms provide possibilities for countering violence. Through a series of case studies of cities including Baghdad, Bogotá, Ciudad Juarez, Kabul, and Karachi, the book reveals the unequal distribution of insecurity as well as how urban capabilities might offer resistance and hope. Through analyses of how contemporary forms of identity, inequality, and segregation interact with the built environment, Cities at War explains why and how political violence has become increasingly urbanized. It also points toward the capacity of the city to shape a different kind of urban subjectivity that can serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and equitable future.