Urban blogs
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Climate resilient cities: a role for the media
27 September 2013Journalists can remind city officials and urban residents about ‘hidden finance’ for climate resilience, and ensure the money gets well spent, says David Dodman.
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Slum-dwellers show that revolutions are not built in a day
22 August 2013Slum dwellers across Africa and Asia have used new tactics to achieve social justice and urban rights.
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8 points on financing climate change adaptation in urban areas
20 June 2013As the urgency for governments and international agencies to address climate change increases, an expert meeting identified eight key points on finance priorities.
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How does a changing climate impact on urban poverty?
28 March 2013When floods hit a city, usually low-income groups are hit hardest. The devastation that such disasters cause can be linked to the failure of city governments to manage growth and build infrastructure.
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Does development assistance have a future?
20 November 2012No one unequivocally and wholeheartedly said development assistance worked at yesterday’s debate on whether it had a future. All three panel speakers saw the need for a radical change in approach.
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Rethinking finance for development in city ‘slums’
12 October 2012The Asian Coalition for Community Action is challenging the traditional model of aid by providing small grants to low-income communities to upgrade the ‘slums’ or informal settlements in which they live.
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Basic service provision shouldn’t just be a money maker
8 October 2012Are utility companies forgetting that their core function is to provide services and not just make money?
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6th World Urban Forum: will the agenda of slum and shack dwellers ever get considered?
7 September 2012David Satterthwaite asks why representatives from the federations and networks of slum or shack dwellers were absent from almost all the official events and wonders when their priorities will get the attention they deserve.
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The real issue is universal access to affordable basic services
14 August 2012Why have global leaders endorsed partial Millennium Development Goal targets, asks Diana Mitlin, leaving millions without water, sanitation or healthcare?
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Beyond the Millennium Development Goals
1 August 2012How can we ensure the targets that replace the Millennium Development Goals lead to a future that low-income groups want?
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Why enumeration counts: documenting by the undocumented
10 May 2012People living in informal settlements are often deliberately left out of official surveys and maps. Now they're documenting themselves.
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Debunking the myths about migration and climate change
16 November 2011After years of alarmist predictions of hundreds of millions of climate refugees fleeing their homes, there is now a broad-based consensus that while the impacts of climate change will increase the number of migrants, it is not the only factor that drives people to move
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Thailand's floods: complex political and geographical factors behind the crisis
2 November 2011The scale of Thailand's floods are unprecedented. In the midst of the crisis, water management has become a politically sensitive matter
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Why survivors should lead responses to disasters
20 October 2011 -
People power: the urban poor are now a force to be reckoned with
17 October 2011Speakers at the "View from the streets" event in London showed how the urban poor can group together to bring about change
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Why are the main means by which urban dwellers avoid hunger ignored?
5 October 2011The issue of hunger in urban areas has long been neglected, as part of a more general neglect of urban poverty. And when the issue is covered, there are some glaring gaps in the analysis
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No easy, quick solutions to improving life in the "slums"
5 September 2011BBC journalist Paul Mason’s “Our World,” shown on the 26th August 2011, relies once more on professionalized solutions to offer hope to those living in Manila, the capital of the Philippines – and the most densely populated city on earth. But they’re not a viable solution for the 900 million people living in informal settlements and other forms of inadequate accommodation such as crowded inner city dwellings.
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Braking Beijing’s car addiction
20 January 2011Driven by subsidies for small cars and an ever increasing middle class, the Chinese year of the tiger saw a ferocious increase in the car industry — a whopping 18.1 million vehicles (including 13.8 million cars) were sold in China in 2010, up by a third from the previous year. But will new efforts by Beijing combat both the booming economy and the grid-locked streets? And is this another example of China setting a new course for a greener future?
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Low2No helps show how to build sustainable cities
16 June 2010‘Low-carbon growth’ seems to be mentioned all the time with regards to environment and development policy. As a theory this is great, but how can the theory be made more concrete? What might the practice of low-carbon growth look like when applied to urban environments?
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Let's get compact
26 March 2010The future sprawls before us — urban sprawl, that is. John Vidal of the UK Guardian says that in 50 years, we could see ‘vast “mega-regions” which may stretch hundreds of miles across countries and be home to more than 100 million people’.
In fact, they’re here already: the gargantuan Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Ghaungzhou conurbation, to take just one example, houses more than 120 million people.
Whether in-migration to these regions is a trickle or a flood (and the downturn has apparently had a mixed effect on migration to cities), the urban pull remains powerful, as the poor chase jobs and escape degraded rural environments or conflict.