Settlements Of Hope

The Aim Of The Book Is To Examine The View Held By Urban Poor Of Their Society And To Understand Their Hopes Or Frustrations, Thier Activity Or Apparent Apathy, In The Light Of Their Perceptions.

Over 10,000 men, women, and children were placed on farms in Australia during the 1920s as part of the soldier plan after World War II. Of the 12,000 families settled in Victoria, a majority failed to establish themselves, and the cost of this ill-conceived plan was enormous, both to the people and the state. This innovative social history focuses on the experiences of the settlers as they struggled against appalling conditions to make ends meet and maintain their dignity.

The Cape Flats, a windswept, barren and sandy area which rings Cape Town, is home to more than a million people. Many live here in sprawling shack settlements. The post-apartheid state is attempting to eradicate such settlements by providing formal houses in planned residential estates. Raw Life, New Hope is a longitudinal study of the residents of one such shack settlement, The Park, who moved to new, 'formal' houses in The Village, at the turn of the millennium. It introduces readers to core social science topics and modes of theorising. Over 17 years the author has traced how ordinary people attempt to live in accord with their ideals of decency under almost impossible circumstances, and the effects of material changes in their lives after 1994, including the provision of housing. Photos, maps, anecdotes, recipes and philosophical reflections on subjects that arose during conversations elicit a sense of the everyday and of how people try to solve the problems of poverty

A desolate settlement is home to three young women who tell the stories of their lives. Anna is curious to discover the secrets of The Marsh and doesn't listen to the storyteller's warnings. Jessica disapproves of her frivolous cousin, but can she resist temptation? Christen feels trapped by the bleak Marsh and longs to escape. A fictional tale of life on Romney Marsh in the sixteenth century.

The historic Hope lands located on the Liguanea Plain in the southeastern parish of St Andrew, Jamaica, and once the site of one of the island's earliest sugar estates, has had a long history of human settlements dating back to approximately 600 CE, the era of the indigenous Tainos. It was not until 1655, however, with the English invasion and seizure of Jamaica from the Spanish, that the Hope landscape developed into a thriving rural agrarian settlement. Generous land grants were made to the invading officers and later to immigrants from Britain and North America and from other Caribbean islands. Major Richard Hope came in possession of over 2,600 acres in the Liguanea Plain. Major Hope, unlike many of his counterparts by the 1660s, managed to establish a small sugar plantation, which developed by the mid-1700s into one of the island's largest, most productive and technologically advanced slave sugar estates. In the 1770s the estate became the property of the Duke of Chandos and his family until 1848, when the estate was dismantled. Over 600 acres were sold to the Kingston and Liguanea Water Works Company and the remaining 1,700 acres were leased to the owner of the adjoining Papine and Mona estates. Poor accounting and border surveillance enabled several persons to possess the land, which was later sanctioned by the Limitations of Actions Law. With the government's acquisition of the entire property in 1909, the Hope estate underwent remarkable changes in the twentieth century. By 1960 the Hope landscape was radically transformed from a sugar estate worked by hundreds of enslaved black people to a premiere urban centre of commercial, residential and educational land use.

A fascinating ethnography of the democratic organization of shack settlements in South Africa.