The South is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate. Occurring concurrently with the accelerated urban growth is what is now commonly referred to as the “urbanization of poverty”—the fact that a rapidly increasing proportion of the world’s poor are to be found in cities and towns. An ever-rising number of urban poor households are thus seeking low-cost housing within their means. This has resulted...

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Turkish cities have undergone large-scale change through a process referred to as urban transformation, involving, notably, the demolition of inner-city low-income settlements. The official authorities and business circles have resorted to various forms of discourse to justify these projects, which have led to the deportation of a significant number o...

Urban informality is typically ascribed to the urban poor in cities of the Global South. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity and taking the case of Rio de Janeiro in the context of the 2016 Olympic Games, this article conceptualizes informality as a signifier and a procedural, relational category. Specifically, it shows how different class actors have employed the signifier inf...

Humanitarian actors have sought increasingly not only to assist people affected by natural disasters but also to protect them. This paper examines the efforts of international humanitarian actors to protect Haitians affected by the devastating earthquake of 12 January 2010. It begins with an analysis of the particular difficulties of conceptualising and operationalising protection in an urban e...

Modern rapidly expanding cities generate intricate patterns of species diversity owing to immense complexity in urban spatial structure and current growth trajectories. We propose to identify and uncouple the drivers that give rise to these patterns by looking at the effect of urbanism on species diversity over a previously unexplored long temporal frame that covers early developments in urbani...

The high rates of urbanization amidst stagnating economies and poor governance have created a new face of abject poverty concentrated in overcrowded slum settlements in Africa’s major cities. Emerging evidence demonstrates that poor residents in African cities often experience worse health vulnerabilities than many other segments of national sub-populations, including rural residents. Analysis ...

introduction promoting villages to towns is among the prominent characteristics of urbanization in few past decades and remains as a major challenge facing managers, policymakers and urban planners, particularly in developing countries. in iran, one of the growing impacts of rapid urbanization on the spatial structure of country is growing the number of urban centers via transformation villages...