Urbanisation, Sustainable Growth and Poverty Reduction in Asia

Almost 3 billion people live in urban areas across the world – equivalent to 48 per cent of the world’s total population. Asia accounts for almost half of these, with an urban population of between 1.3 and 1.5 billion people, accounting for approximately 37 per cent of Asia’s total population (UN-Habitat 2003a; ACHR 2005). These statistics for Asia are perhaps conservative, as different countries define ‘urban centres ’ differently, based upon both population size and other criteria. If either India or China were to redefine their criteria to include some smaller settlements as ‘urban’, then an even greater proportion of Asia’s population would be considered ‘urban’ (Satterthwaite 2005). Asia has a fast growing urban population. The urban population in the region as a whole is projected to grow to 1.8 billion by 2010 (see Figure 1), and as a result Asia is expected to account for a growing proportion of the world’s urban population – just over 50 per cent by 2010 (see Figures 2 and 3). The UN expects this number to increase to between 53 per cent and 55 per cent of the world’s urban population by 2030 (UN-Habitat 2004). In addition to a growing urban population, Asia is also urbanising – that is a growing proportion of its total population live in urban areas (see Figure 4). There are three potential factors contributin

How the Urban Poor Define and Measure Food Security in Cambodia and Nepal

Urban food security, or its lack, is attracting growing interest in global policy debates. Glaringly missing in these conversations, however, are the voices of the urban poor. To fill this gap, grassroots community organizations, with decades-long experience collecting data on their own communities and taking action to improve conditions, decided to ask the urban poor in Cambodia and Nepal how they define and measure food security, what key challenges they face in the daily struggle to put food on the table and what actions might help. Their findings show that access to adequate diets is a major challenge for low-income communities in Asia, and that hunger is widespread, although with great variations and fluctuations between and within households. They also highlight the extraordinary resilience of urban poor women and their multiple strategies to stretch meagre budgets and make sure there is something to eat, even though sometimes this is not enough

The developmental state, speculative urbanisation and the politics of displacement in gentrifying Seoul

What does gentrification mean under speculative urbanisation led by a strong developmental state? This paper analyses the contemporary history of Seoul’s urban redevelopment, arguing that new-build gentrification is an endogenous process embedded in Korea’s highly speculative urban development processes from the 1980s. Property owners, construction firms and local/central governments coalesce, facilitating the extraction of exchange value by closing the rent gap. Displacement of poorer owner-occupiers and tenants was requisite for the success of speculative accumulation. Furthermore, the paper also contends that Korea’s speculative urbanisation under the strong developmental (and later (neo-)liberalising) state has rendered popular resistance to displacement ineffective despite its initial success in securing state concessions. Examining the experience of Seoul in times of condensed industrialisation and speculative urbanisation helps inform the existing literature on gentrification by resorting to non-Western empirics

Constructing ordinary places: Place-making in urban informal settlements in Mexico

Observers from a variety of disciplines agree that informal settlements account for the majority of housing in many cities of the global South. Urban informal settlements, usually defined by certain criteria such as self-build housing, sub-standard services, and residents’ low incomes, are often seen as problematic, due to associations with poverty, irregularity and marginalisation. In particular, despite years of research and policy, gaps in urban theory and limited understandings of urban informal settlements mean that they are often treated as outside ‘normal’ urban considerations, with material effects for residents including discrimination, eviction and displacement. In response to these considerations, this article uses a place-making approach to explore the spatial, social and cultural construction of place in this context, in order to unsettle some of the assumptions underlying discursive constructions of informal settlements, and how these relate to spatial and social marginalisation. Research was carried out using a qualitative, ethnographic methodology in two case study neighbourhoods in Xalapa, Mexico. Mexico offers fertile ground to explore these issues. Despite an extensive land tenure regularisation programme, at least 60 per cent of urban dwellers live in colonias populares, neighbourhoods with informal characteristics. The research found that local discourses reveal complex and ambivalent views of colonias populares, which both reproduce and undermine marginalising tendencies relating to ‘informality’. A focus on residents’ own place-making activities hints at prospects for rethinking urban informal settlements. By capturing the messy, dynamic and contextualised processes that construct urban informal settlements as places, the analytical lens of place-making offers a view of the multiple influences which frame them. Informed by perspectives from critical social geography which seek to capture the ‘ordinary’ nature of cities, this article suggests imagining urban informal settlements differently, in order to re-evaluate their potential contribution to the city as a whole

India’s Draft Universal Periodic Report-II: A Case of Forced Marriage?

The paper has the objective of viewing the condition of women in terms of freedom of choice, freedom and expression and right of privacy. Also it views violence against women.Universal Periodic Report, HUMAN RIGHTS, INDIA, constitutional, legal, Freedom of religion, Right to privacy, marriage and family life, Torture, violence, women, justice, rule of law, public life

ACHR Weekly Review: Pakistan: The Land of Religious Apartheid and Jackboot Justice

On 14 August 2007, the United Nations Committee on the International Convention Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD Committee) is tentatively scheduled to examine the situation of Pakistan without the report of the government of Pakistan. The government of Pakistan has failed to submit its five periodic reports since January 1998.Pakistan, religious apartheid, jackboot justice, civil liberties, racial discrimination, United Nations, Sociology, Interntional Affairs, ESCR rights, Pakistani Hindu Council, balochis, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Asian center off human rights