This book provides an important account of how the city in South Asia is produced, lived and contested. It examines the diverse lived experiences of urban South Asia through a focus on contestations over urban space, resources and habitation, bringing together accounts from India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. In contrast to accounts that attribute urban transformation mainly to neoliberal globalisation, this book vividly demonstrates how neoliberalism functions as one of the many drivers of urban change. This edited volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international range of established and emerging scholars working on the city in South Asia. To date, South Asian urban studies privilege a handful of cities, particularly in India, overlooking the great diversity, as well as commonalities, of urban experiences spanning the region. Thus, in addition to chapters on New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, this volume contains critical urban chapters on less-studied cities such as Lahore, Islamabad, Kathmandu, Colombo and Dhaka. The volume insists that a fresh look at contemporary changes in cities in South Asia requires careful consideration of the specificity of the city, as well as a comparative perspective. It provides a sense not only of the new forms of urbanism emerging in contemporary South Asia, but also sheds light on new theoretical possibilities and directions to make sense of transnational processes and urban change.

Smart Urbanism (SU) – the rebuilding of cities through the integration of digital technologies with buildings, neighbourhoods, networked infrastructures and people – is being represented as a unique emerging ‘solution’ to the majority of problems faced by cities today. SU discourses, enacted by technology companies, national governments and supranational agencies alike, claim a supremacy of urban digital technologies for managing and controlling infrastructures, achieving greater effectiveness in managing service demand and reducing carbon emissions, developing greater social interaction and community networks, providing new services around health and social care etc. Smart urbanism is being represented as the response to almost every facet of the contemporary urban question. This book explores this common conception of the problematic of smart urbanism and critically address what new capabilities are being created by whom and with what exclusions; how these are being developed - and contested; where is this happening both within and between cities; and, with what sorts of social and material consequences. The aim of the book is to identify and convene a currently fragmented and disconnected group of researchers, commentators, developers and users from both within and outside the mainstream SU discourse, including several of those that adopt a more critical perspective, to assess ‘what’ problems of the city smartness can address The volume provides the first internationally comparative assessment of SU in cities of the global north and south, critically evaluates whether current visions of SU are able to achieve their potential; and then identifies alternative trajectories for SU that hold radical promise for reshaping cities.

Product Description: Infrastructural Lives is the first book to describe the everyday experience and politics of urban infrastructures. It focuses on a range of infrastructures in both the global South and North. The book examines how day-to-day experience and perception of infrastructure provides a new and powerful lens to view urban sustainability, politics, economics, cultures and ecologies...read more

Learning the City: Translocal Assemblage and Urban Politics critically examines the relationship between knowledge, learning, and urban politics, arguing both for the centrality of learning for political strategies and developing a progressive international urbanism.   Presents a distinct approach to conceptualising the city through the lens of urban learning Integrates fieldwork conducted in Mumbai's informal settlements with debates on urban policy, political economy, and development Considers how knowledge and learning are conceived and created in cities Addresses the way knowledge travels and opportunities for learning about urbanism between North and South