Contemporary Urban Missions and Reflecting Reality in Deprivation of Civil Areas in Indian Cantonments – A Pragmatic View

The contemporary urban schemes were launched around five years ago by the National Government to create more inclusive cities and offer a decent quality of life to urban residents. But in reality, the civilian areas of Cantonments are grossly overlooked from the benefits of such welfare schemes. There are 52 notified civil areas in Indian Cantonments with a population of 2.08 million, according to the 2011 census. The Cantonment Act, 2006 (by repealing the Cantonment Act, 1924) empowered Cantonment Boards to act as ‘deemed to be a municipality ’to receive grants and implement government welfare schemes, including the provision of 24 types of infrastructure and services to its residents. The present research reviews the provisions and coverage of contemporary urban missions, including Smart Cities, and highlights civilian areas of the cantonments as deprived urban areas. Besides the non-implementation of contemporary urban welfare schemes, issues like the age-old colonial infrastructure, revenue crunch through taxes and non-taxes, absence of development plan, lack of inter-jurisdictional coordination etc., need to be addressed. The present research will act as an input for policymakers to understand the problems of civilian areas, nature, and extent of welfare scheme implementation, and also suggest the necessary changes required at the policy level.

“A Sort of Public Living Room”: Ignorance and the Racial Management of Disorder in Postwar Los Angeles

Exploring sanitation in postwar Los Angeles, this article argues that as white voluntary groups formed task forces to clean up the city, they endangered Mexican and black Angelinos by endorsing solutions to urban welfare defined by antistatism and carceralism. I read these activities through the lens of white ignorance, whereby white Americans elaborated folk knowledge of successful urbanism on their own terrain and terms, which had no capacity to attend to other classes and races. I treat white ignorance not as a cognitive defect or proxy for innocence, but rather as a structural condition of postwar urban political economy.

Is the Creative Class a Game Changer in Cities? A Socioeconomic Study on Romania

In the wake of current urbanization trends, Creative Class theory has gained much popularity. According to the theory, in order to achieve sustainable socioeconomic growth and citizens’ well-being, cities have to attract the Creative Class, who prefer places that simultaneously provide amenities such as tolerance, talent, technology, and territorial assets (the four Ts). Although the theory has been tested extensively in the USA and in Western European countries, few attempts have been made to study it in Eastern Europe. As such, this paper tests Creative Class theory in the case of Romania, which is an interesting country for this study, since it has a relatively low level of urbanization and the population is less mobile compared to Western countries. Our results show that talent, technology, and territorial assets are able to significantly explain the geographical concentration of the Creative Class. However, different types of tolerance have different effects on the concentration of the Creative Class. Nevertheless, when we control for conventional socioeconomic welfare variables, the results change. The variable that has the highest effect on welfare patterns is path-dependency, namely, the previous level of regional and urban welfare registered. Thus, this paper reflects the need for both researchers and practitioners to consider the path-dependency trajectories of socioeconomic health and well-being in urban areas.

Waste management and value extraction in Italy: Where is the citizen? Waste to worth

The chapter focuses on the role of citizens and how this role is framed in official reports about waste. The hypothesis advanced is that the “objectivity” of the win-win game of waste recycling, accounted for by the official national reports, neutralizes the political overlapping of the neoliberal logic of waste commodification with the logics of public utility and urban welfare. A documentary analysis of official reports released by three of the most important actors performing Italian governance of waste management and recycling, is presented. The findings show how different logics adopted in the institutional accounting strategy contribute towards enacting a particular identity and agency of citizens in the process of waste valorisation.

Housing System and Urbanization in the People’s Republic of China

This chapter provides a contextualized interpretation of the transformation of housing regimes in urban China since the abolition of the urban welfare housing system in 1998. Particular attention is given to the impacts of public housing provision on China’s urbanization mode. The employment of the widely used state-market-family model is supplemented by contextualization. A close examination of the case of Public Rental Housing (PRH) in Shanghai helps to show that the recent revival of public housing in Chinese cities is mostly driven by economic growth motives. Despite that the Chinese urban housing regime up to now could be located within the context of other Asian countries’ ‘productivist’ welfare regimes, this chapter however discerns mixed evidence that it is recently shifting towards a ‘developmentalist’ regime. This investigation offers multifaceted insights on the complexity of the social-economic dynamics in post-reform urban China.