A hundred-year-old street market in Bangalore was demolished in the dead of night last month. The colourful stalls of vendors spilling out onto the streets were illegal encroachments, but how much history and local colour is lost by enforcing the law now after so many years of peaceful coexistence?
Slum neighbourhoods are teeming with industry and commerce, yet the policy sphere still tends to treat them as residential spaces alone. What are the consequences of this misconception, and is it time to invoke a right to space, not just of housing?
...but with the Al Maktoum International Airport, the logistics centre in Jebel Ali, and a flourishing of small-scale economic life, evidence would suggest otherwise, as Michele Acuto observes.
Mumbai is looking to involve the private sector to manage the tons of solid waste it generates every day, but it must be done without marginalising the informal 'ragpickers' who do this work already.
Last week we published a review of the BBC Two documentary Welcome to Lagos, which has been criticised by many arms of Nigerian government.
The Nigerian government is demonstrating a strangely Eurocentric mindset in its display of anger over the BBC2 documentary, Welcome to Lagos, which shows only a people who are resourceful, enterprising, organised and content.
Michele Acuto is CPD Research Fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School, PhD Candidate at the Australian National University…
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The Global Urbanist is an online magazine reviewing urban affairs and urban development issues in cities throughout the developed and developing world.
Its readers are drawn from the urban policy and international development sectors, and include urban planners, officers in local, national or international government agencies, civil society leaders, and researchers.
