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Abstract The increasing dependence on street vending as a source of livelihood for people across urban spaces in countries like Cambodia and India continues to promote exciting areas of research in social sciences. Our study captures the narratives of street vendors (seen as the 'invisible' entrepreneurs), working in markets across Delhi (India) and Phnom Penh (Cambodia) and analyzes the inventory logistics of products sold by them, thereby, reflecting the complex nature of an inter-twined, existential relationship between what's classified as 'informal' and 'formal' in urban economies. The mutual interdependence seen in the governing dynamics of economic exchange (for example, in selling commodities and services across identified markets in Phnom Penh and Delhi), argues for a need to inclusively study urban ecosystems while addressing the needs of street vendors. This paper does so by incorporating ethnographic methods with a specific reference to street vending (as a commercial urban activity). Further, we emphasize on an epistemic need to cross-fertilize thought(s) and method(s) across social science disciplines to produce more of such urban narratives, exploring the inter-twined relationship between the 'informal' and 'formal' aspects of urban ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to some ambiguities in defining the domain of public space in traditional Islamic cities and gaps in the knowledge related to the Kurdish cities, this paper examines the conception of the public domain in the Kurdish context. Drawing on points of similarities and differences with Iranian and Islamic contexts, we delineate the intricacies of how Kurds conceptualised the public domain, and specifically how females have experienced that domain, with regard to the common view of “unsafeness”. We also describe the role of women and their relationship to space outside of kinship ties. The paper concludes that the Kurdish context to some extent is different from other Islamic and Iranian contexts, due to the status of Kurdish women and the socio-political and environmental circumstances which marked that society. Therefore these conditions led to a kind of soft boundary between the two realms of public and private life and, thus, allowed the possibility of women’s negotiation with public domain more than in other Islamic cultures. In Women’s social realm today, it became clear that the traditional way of public gathering was gradually being kept on the periphery of the city to such an extent it only remained appropriate among the poor and uneducated families, those who settled either in the city’s traditional part or on the fringe. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is an examination of the “discourse of disaster” that has cleared the way for the dismantling of public housing in the US. It is argued that this narrative represents public housing communities as deviant, dysfunctional, or obsolete. In response, residents have generated a discourse of resistance that focuses on dimensions of home and community. The social science evidence that validates the residents’ storyline is summarized. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Over the past four decades, as urbanization has increased in the Global South, pressures have mounted apace to convert slums to higher value use. In spite of policy shifts towards including residents’ viewpoints, involuntary resettlement remains inherently conflictive on at least two levels: between residents and outside actors and among residents themselves. In this paper we present a social mediation approach that addresses these two levels of conflict, illustrating its application in a slum relocation program in Ennakhil, Morocco. Social mediation occupies a middle ground between an authoritarian, urban planning approach to relocation and resettlement programs that have community empowerment as an explicit objective. We argue that a clear emphasis on mediating conflict should be more widely incorporated in slum relocation and other development programs. While the social mediation approach has clear advantages over authoritarian approaches, it is also better suited than the empowerment approach for projects that, like involuntary resettlement, inherently generate conflict and limit the opportunities for disadvantaged groups to control decisions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper demonstrates the potential of bibliometric analysis in the context of urban studies. After a brief discussion of the measurement of knowledge production, we provide an analysis of how the field of urban studies is constructed. We do this in three contexts: first, in the narrowly defined population of journals that constitutes the Thomson Reuters classification of urban studies; second, in the larger population of journals deemed to be within the social and behavioral sciences; and third, in a subset of the applied sciences. We find that, by using keyword analysis, it is possible to identify three distinct spheres of ‘urban knowledge’ that contain some overlap but also significant differences. We explore the significance of that for the development of urban studies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]