Urbanization In South Research Articles

The role of the informal economy in promoting urban sustainability: Evidence from a small Zimbabwean town.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the informal economy is enhancing urban sustainability in the context of global South urbanism. It uses evidence collected through ethnographic methods from Norton – a small Zimbabwean town to demonstrate how the informal economy is driving sustainable urbanism in its small ways in the absence of a functional formal economy in the town. While it acknowledges sustainable concerns around informal urbanisation, the paper argues that the sector can be an asset that can be harnessed to advance the sustainable urbanisation agenda. The study argues that some of the sector’s activities are playing a big role in; natural environment stewardship, skills development, promotion of social cohesion, indigenous knowledge systems and Ubuntu as well as contributing towards economic development. The paper argues for city and national governments to put more efforts to harness these seemingly small contributions in the quest to build more sustainable cities.

The Tell 'Uqair temple (4th mill.BC) : colours and iconography

Date: ca. 3400-3100 BC, late Uruk period, first urbanization of south Mesopotamia.Location: Tell ‘Uqair, Babylonia, Iraq.Abstract: This contribution presents the “painted temple” of Tell ‘Uqair, which has provided evidences for bright paintings on the interior. Based on the archaeological report, as well as on in-depth comparisons with other urukean building, we focus on a colorful reconstruction of one of the characters, offering new interpretation of its symbolic meaning.

To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South

Angela Jill Cooley's compelling history argues that public eateries were a flashpoint in the urban Jim Crow South because they endangered the region's racial hierarchy. By attending to de facto and de jure segregation as a “careful performance of race-specific roles” designed to support white supremacy and by amply demonstrating food culture as its main stage, Cooley richly complicates understanding of the evolving New South city (p. 108). Structured in three parts, each consisting of one chapter on changes in food culture and one on associated changes in law and society, this history spans nearly one century from the end of Reconstruction to the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Cooley explicates how the South's urbanization increased participation in national consumerism and democratized dining out. These transformations, Cooley maintains, spurred implementation of race-based segregation laws in public eateries. Positioning the white southern home as integral to inculcation into white supremacy, chapter 1 elaborates the study's theoretical framework that the intimacy of eating implicated racial purity. Cooley examines how middle-class women used early twentieth-century initiatives to modernize home kitchens to serve whiteness by distinguishing white cooking and consumption as scientific and pure against African American cooking and consumption practices, denigrated as primitive and impure. Yet the drive to perpetuate antebellum conceptualizations of African Americans as a natural servant class overrode white anxieties about blacks' supposed polluting presence. The book proceeds by documenting the realization of this ideological contradiction in white restaurant proprietors' concomitant employment of African Americans in servile positions and strict enforcement of racial segregation.

Urbanities: Grecanici Migration to the City of Reggio Calabria, South Italy

This paper discusses degrees of urbanity or urbanities using ethnographic data from research conducted among the Grecanici communities in the city of Reggio Calabria, south Italy. Urbanization in south Italy is usually associated with social and territorial mobility, education and natural disasters. It is further discussed in terms of a rural/urban duality that masks rather than reveals possible diversities concerning the social life in the city and the links between rural and urban which in the urban environment follow different trajectories. Following the premise that the effects of urbanization cannot be homogenously felt by the actors, I follow the Grecanici migration to the city of Reggio Calabria in the decade of the 1950s in order to argue that urbanities are directly informed by factors such as kinship, neighbourhood identification, education and socio‐economic status.

Migration and Labor Force Participation of Latin American Women: The Domestic Servants in the Cities

This paper deals with the migration of Latin American women from rural to urban areas and their occupational and domestic alternatives in the cities. Inquiry into the relationship between work (or economic participation) of women and family organization has been neglected in the Latin American social sciences, especially in studies focusing on the urban areas. Thus the ideas presented here are highly tentative, and my purpose is to suggest a framework for future research rather than an analytical scheme to cope with a mass of existing data. I will first discuss the main characteristics of rural-to-urban migration in the region, in order to place female migrants in the context of spatial relocation for the population as a whole. Then I will address questions about the productive role of migrant women in the cities, especially their role in domestic service. For the individual migrant, domestic service may be an important means of adaptation to urban life and the urban labor market, although there is some stigma attached to this kind of work. Within the labor market, domestic service has some specific features as regards both supply and demand. Finally, domestic service has a special place in the urban economy, sharing traits of domestic production for selfconsumption while carrying a monetary payment and thus sharing some traits of wage work. In dealing with this last subject, the focus will necessarily have to shift to the household unit (or the family) where both the unpaid and the paid domestic production take place.