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Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholars from the fields of psychology, sociology, law and public health have devoted their attention to examining how and why stigma operates as a form of discrimination, paying particular attention to ethno-racially stigmatised groups. However, less attention has focused on how ordinary women and men engaged in peripheral urbanisation processes are stigmatised through multiple material, social and political mechanisms and with a myriad of outcomes. Building on this literature, and drawing on the trajectories of a man and a woman living in the periphery of metropolitan Lima, I explore how stigmatisation shapes the daily lives of poor and impoverished citizens as they try to find a place in the city, and how and why their everyday practices contribute, or not, to the transformation of stigma traps. I argue that the everyday city-making practices of the 'unsheltered' are inextricably linked to the politics of bare citizenship. As those stigmatised become individualised, isolated and undermined, they also are deprived of being part of a collective experience, and are deeply challenged to reclaim their agency as entitled citizens. The wider the range of stigmatisation mechanisms at work, the more difficult it is for those subjected to stigma to counteract them, as they become disadvantaged in a broad range of domains: from social relations, to tenure security, access to services and infrastructure, livelihood opportunities, and psychological and physical wellbeing. I further contend that a deep examination of the material world – the dwelling, the neighbourhood and the city – and of the practices and imaginaries that produce this material world, opens a window into the micro-politics of how stigma is negotiated, apportioned and resisted in the everyday lives of those who are politically and materially unsheltered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many urbanites, infrastructural uncertainty refers to ‘predictable shocks’ rather than constituting a quotidian experience. By contrast, for the peri-urban poor, the sources of uncertainty underpinning water and sanitation services are endless: uncertainty about cost, about being evicted and indeed about ever becoming connected to networked systems. Drawing on a number of case studies, we argue that across the urban global south, the future is not one of networked systems but rather one of ‘infrastructural archipelagos’ that need to be thoroughly understood in order to bridge the growing gap between everyday and large infrastructural planning practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within the wider ongoing debate of Participatory Action Research, this paper interrogates the capacity of participatory mapping not just as a means to tap into plural knowledges over and emanating from specific geographies but rather to disrupt exclusionary constructions of space and place and the reproduction of the governing relationships that cause inequality. Focusing on a participatory mapping experience undertaken by the authors in collaboration with local residents in the steep slopes of Bogotá's eastern hills - an area threatened by forced evictions in the name of ecological preservation and risk protection arguments - we explore why and under what conditions participatory mapping might have the potential to disrupt conflicting interpretations of place and space held both by local residents and state agencies, which in turn can open the room to rework what types of interventions are actually needed and why. We hypothesise that this depends on the extent to which mapping can abridge the different scales at which the state and marginalised communities make sense of a site historically underpinned by different forms of spatial myopia and territorial stigma. This is in our view not just a consequence of the application of participatory mapping techniques per se, but depends on the way in which mapping is used to expand the political space in which different conceptions of a territory can effectively talk to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sites of urban agriculture are often contested urban open spaces. In the current dominant ideal of the ‘competitive’ and ‘global’ city, little recognition is given to the potential benefits of urban agriculture, beyond beautification, subsistence or therapeutic purposes. In this context, urban agriculture is often viewed as an activity performed by ‘gardeners’, either contributing to individual well-being or reducing the costs of maintenance of public spaces. A less ‘tolerant’ perspective perceives such ‘gardeners’ as squatters inhibiting cities' productivity. By contrast, urban agriculture enthusiasts advocate the recognition of the right to farm in the city as an essential condition for either food security or food sovereignty. This paper argues that urban agriculture can also be interpreted as a means to claim, nurture and propagate alternative views on spatial justice, place and citizenship-making, defying the maldistributional and misrecognition patterns that typically produce and reproduce unequal urban geographies. Drawing from a four-year research collaboration in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) undertaken by the authors at the Development Planning Unit (DPU) with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), People's Dialogue and the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor, the analysis examines the trajectories of female and male farmers working under different and fast-changing land tenure systems across the Accra–Ashaiman corridor. Adopting an environmental justice perspective, the analysis explores the extent to which urban agriculture might constitute a practice through which marginalised groups might actively claim spaces of daily sociability and political articulation within the city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of urban metabolism, referring to the exchange processes that produce the urban environment, has inspired new ways of thinking about how cities can be made sustainable and has also raised criticisms about the specific social and economic arrangements in which some forms of flow are prioritized or marginalized within the city. This article explores how the concept of urban metabolism travels across disciplines, using a comparative analysis of different approaches to urban metabolism within industrial ecology, urban ecology, ecological economics, political economy and political ecology. The analysis reveals six main themes emerging within interdisciplinary boundaries in relation to urban metabolism, and how this concept enables new understandings of (1) the city as an ecosystem, (2) material and energy flows within the city, (3) economic-material relations within the city, (4) economic drivers of rural-urban relationships, (5) the reproduction of urban inequality, and (6) attempts at resignifying the city through new visions of socioecological relationships. The article suggests potential areas for cross-disciplinary synergies around the concept of urban metabolism and opens up avenues for industrial ecology to engage with the politics and the governance of urban development by examining the city and its metabolism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents preliminary results from an on-going research project on the governance of water and sanitation services in the PUI of five metropolitan areas in three continents. It explores differences and similarities in the formal and informal practices in the delivery and consumption of these services. It deals with issues of access to decision-making, exploring the role that different actors, including state institutions, play in the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the internal and external reforms introduced in the last two decades in Argentina, as in most Latin American countries, urban-based manufacturing activities have experienced a dramatic process of restructuring, which has prompted new social and environmental conflicts. In a context where macro-economic strategies are resulting in long-term restructuring of production patterns and local conflicts, it is important to assess the sustainability of current urban development trends. Focusing on a case study of the city of Mar del Plata, this paper looks at how the fishing industry has been restructured from a nationally confined to an internationally open system. The paper examines how and why governance frameworks regulating the appropriation and transformation of nature have changed during the restructuring process, and have consequently reshaped the ability of the local state, firms, and citizen-workers to protect the natural resource base on which the local economy depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the management of the health effects of climate change. The authors explain that inputs from all sectors of government and civil society, collaboration between academic disciplines, and new ways of international cooperation will be needed. The importance of reducing poverty and health inequities is discussed. The greenhouse effect, anthropogenic climate change, and global warming are examined. Six ways that link climate change to health are examined: changing patterns of disease and mortality, extreme events, food, water, shelter, and population and migration. Challenges associated with the generation and dissemination of information are discussed. The technological challenge to address the negative health consequences of climate change in poor countries is examined.

This paper explores how and why pedagogues within universities can and need to work as 'one amongst many' to advance critical pedagogies for urban equality. The discussion draws on two contrasting experiences: the networked schools of the Habitat International Coalition in Latin America (HIC-AL) - a coalition of civil society organizations, social movements and universities working in defense of habitat-related human rights - and the co-learning processes with housing rights activists activated by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) - a national education institution committed to the equitable, sustainable and efficient transformation of Indian settlements. Both experiences place emphasis on crafting critical pedagogies that seek to fundamentally disrupt, re-frame and re-position institutional relations of knowledges and learning practices, while advancing capacities for transformative urban change. The analysis demonstrates how epistemic injustices - often proliferated in and by higher education institutions - can be counteracted, and why fostering epistemic justice requires re-positioning universities as one amongst many in a wider ecosystem of urban pedagogies, in open and productive dialogue with new institutional forms that Boaventura de Sousa Santos defines as the 'pluriversity' and the 'subversity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]