Books & ideas

Basic Urban Services in India: a Paradoxical Bricolage

Hugo Ribadeau-Dumas — 2021-03-15T08:00:00Z

Why is India still unable to efficiently supply basic services to all urban dwellers? When the public authorities concentrate large projects in megalopolises, small towns improvise heterogeneous solutions, thereby reinforcing segregation.

The Globalisation of Lockdowns

Éric Charmes & Max Rousseau — 2020-06-01T07:00:00Z

If Covid-19 has spread so rapidly, it is namely because urbanisation is now planetary and connects a wide range of territories to each other, through an international flows of goods and people.

Of Cities and Their Mores

Denis Bocquet — 2018-11-12T08:00:00Z

What do late nineteenth-century Berlin and Cairo have in common? The German historian Joseph Ben Prestel accepts the challenge of comparing these two cities in order to interrogate the boundaries between Europe and the Middle East, as well as orientalism's assumptions.

The Judge as an Urban Planner

Sanjeev Routray — 2018-02-12T08:00:00Z

Two recent books explore how the judiciary has become the new engine of urban restructuration in New Delhi. Having managed to get hold of a real ‘slum demolition machine', the judges are arbitrarily trying to impose their upper-middle class conception of the city.

Heaven for Hull?

Yann Béliard — 2018-01-25T08:00:00Z

Once celebrated as the third British port behind London and Liverpool, Kingston-upon-Hull descended into disrepute with the 1970s economic crisis and has, more or less every year since then, topped the list of Britain's “crap cities”. The contested choice of Hull as UK City of Culture 2017 has raised high hopes about a possible renaissance. But in the era of austerity and Brexit, there are reasons to question the benefits the City of Culture experience may yield for Hull's common people.