Cities And Villages

In cities throughout the world, there is an increasingly ubiquitous presence of distinct social and spatial areas - urban villages, cultural and ethnic quarters. These spaces are sites where capital and culture intertwine in new ways. City of Quarters brings together some of the most prominent authors writing about urban villages to provide the first systematic and multi-disciplinary overview of this high-profile urban phenomenon. They address key questions such as 'What is the role of urban villages and quarters in the contemporary city?' and 'What are the economic, political, socio-spatial and cultural practices and processes that surround these urban spaces?' Blending conceptual chapters with theoretically directed case studies from all over the world, this book includes issues such as local and regional development strategies, production, consumption, the creative industries, popular culture, identity, lifestyle, and tourism.

Village Swaraj It is, indeed, a matter for gratification that the Navajivan Trust is publishing selections from Mahatma Gandhis writings on "Village Swaraj" in a book form. The publication contains Gandhiji's views on different aspects of rural life including agriculture, village industry, animal husbandry, transport, basic education, health and hygiene. At a time when we are endeavoring to establish Panchayat Raj in India on the basis of wide decentralization of political and economic power, this book is bound to be of great value to a large number of official as well as non-official workers. The Community Development movement should not be regarded as some kind of a programme which has been largely imported from the Western democracies; it must necessarily be based on Indian conditions and traditions.

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a ‘Neolithic’ way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle-range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. While there have been a number of studies that address coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out "on the ground" in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt in order to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies which span four continents and more than 10,000 years of human history.

John Nolen’s New Ideals in the Planning of Cities, Towns, and Villages is the most thorough assessment of city planning written by an American practitioner before 1920. It records the interplay of urban reform in Europe and the United States, the rise of the planning expert, the design of new towns, and the technique for directing urban expansion on systematic lines. Most important, it documents the blueprint for investing the "peace dividend" of the Great War to make urban life "more fit for democracy". Written for men fighting to make the world safe for democracy, New Ideals revealed how the domestic part of the peace program could justify their sacrifice. The wartime housing initiative had improved the living conditions of industrial workers and the same public regulation and control of the layout and character of residential neighbourhoods could provide what "men of service expect to find on their return, a new and better type of workman’s home." While New Ideals strained towards the utopian, experience tempered Nolen’s expectations and the high aims of the book were not immediately realised in a post-war society seeking a return to pre-war normalcy. However in the last decade, Nolen’s planned communities have been closely studied as the demand for pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods set on sustainable lines has moved from novelty to policy. New Ideals is an important text not only for its design template, but also its aspirations. Nolen’s call to "make cites that will serve the needs--physical, economic, and spiritual-- of all people" lays at the heart of the city planning profession and the lessons Nolen imparted inform a new generation planning cities to be both resilient and just.

This book argues for the value of urban villages as places. To reveal their qualities, a series of drawings and photographs uncovers the immerse concentration of social life in their dense structures and provides a peek into residents homes and daily lives.