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.
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.
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.
