Integrating Home-Based Enterprises in Urban Planning: A Case for Providing Economic Succour for Women of Global South

The emergence of the climate change discourse in urban planning emphasises resilience as a key concept to deal with issues such as climate mitigation and adaptation, and urban health. What we have termed in this article ‘green resilience’, the coalescence of technological solutions and resilience thinking to solve cities’ ecological issues, is constantly gaining traction in urban planning research. However, green resilience often fails to take into account the socio-political and spatial processes that pertain to the exploitation of land for urban development particularly in the global South. Based on our latest research on two urban megaprojects, in Johor-Singapore (Malaysia) and Doha (Qatar), in this article we build a critique of green resilience and urbanism by leveraging research in the fields of environmental humanities and urban planning.

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Walking for Transport Versus Recreation: A Comparison of Participants, Timing, and Locations

Journal of Physical Activity and Health ◽

10.1123/jpah.9.2.153 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 153-162 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

Jamie E. L. Spinney ◽

Hugh Millward ◽

Darren Scott

Keyword(s):

Public Health ◽

Physical Activity ◽

Urban Planning ◽

Time Use ◽

Wilcoxon Test ◽

Participation Rates ◽

Chi Square ◽

Home Based ◽

Chi Square Test ◽

Recreational Walking

Background:Walking is the most common physical activity for adults with important implications for urban planning and public health. Recreational walking has received considerably more attention than walking for transport, and differences between them remain poorly understood.Methods:Using time-use data collected from 1971 randomly-chosen adults in Halifax, Canada, we identified walking for transport and walking for recreation events, and then computed participation rates, occurrences, mean event durations, and total daily durations in order to examine the participants and timing, while the locations were examined using origin-destination matrices. We compared differences using McNemar’s test for participation rates, Wilcoxon test for occurrences and durations, and Chi-Square test for locations.Results:Results illustrate many significant differences between the 2 types of walking, related to participants, timing, and locations. For example, results indicate a daily average of 3.1 walking for transport events, each lasting 8 minutes on average, compared with 1.4 recreational walking events lasting 39 minutes on average. Results also indicate more than two-thirds of recreational walks are home-based, compared with less than one-fifth of transport walks.Conclusions:This research highlights the importance of both types of walking, while also casting suspicion on the traditional home-based paradigm used to measure “walkability.”

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Agency and servitude in platform labour: a feminist analysis of blended cultures

Media Culture & Society ◽

10.1177/01634437211029890 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 016344372110298

Author(s):

Sai Amulya Komarraju ◽

Payal Arora ◽

Usha Raman

Keyword(s):

Software Development ◽

Service Providers ◽

Global South ◽

Feminist Analysis ◽

On Demand ◽

Self Employment ◽

Politics Of Difference ◽

Home Based ◽

Marginalised Groups ◽

Potential Customers

Digital labour platforms have become important sites of negotiation between expressions of micro-entrepreneurship, worker freedom and dignity of work. In the Global South, these negotiations are overlaid on an already fraught relationship mediated by the dynamics of caste and culture, to the usual politics of difference. Urban Company (UC), an app-based, on-demand platform in India that connects service providers offering home-based services to potential customers, lists professionalised services that have hitherto been considered part of a ‘culture of servitude’, performed by historically marginalised groups afforded little dignity of labour. Such platforms offer the possibility of disrupting the entrenched ‘master-servant’ relationship that exists in many traditional cultures in the Global South by their ostensibly professional approach. While service providers now have the opportunity for self-employment and gain ‘respectability’ by being associated with the platform, UC claims to have leveraged AI to automate discipline in everything the providers do. Using interviews with UC women service providers involved in beauty work and software development engineers, this paper explores the agency afforded to service partners in both professional and personal spheres. Further, we propose the term blended cultures to think about the ways in which algorithms and human cultures mutually (re)make each other.

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Home-based work in cities: In search of an appropriate urban planning response

Futures ◽

10.1016/j.futures.2019.102494 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 102494 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Matthew Zenkteler ◽

Sebastien Darchen ◽

Iderlina Mateo-Babiano ◽

Bernard Baffour

Keyword(s):

Urban Planning ◽

Home Based

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De-Colonising Planning Education? Exploring the Geographies of Urban Planning Education Networks

Urban Planning ◽

10.17645/up.v4i4.2200 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4 (4) ◽

pp. 139-151

Author(s):

Julia Wesely ◽

Adriana Allen

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

Urban Planning ◽

Qualitative Data ◽

Global South ◽

Educational Institutions ◽

Capital Cities ◽

Urban Inequality ◽

Planning Education ◽

Political Processes ◽

Colonial Legacies

Urban planning as a networked field of governance can be an essential contributor for de-colonising planning education and shaping pathways to urban equality. Educating planners with the capabilities to address complex socio-economic, environmental and political processes that drive inequality requires critical engagement with multiple knowledges and urban praxes in their learning processes. However, previous research on cities of the global South has identified severe quantitative deficits, outdated pedagogies, and qualitative shortfalls in current planning education. Moreover, the political economy and pedagogic practices adopted in higher education programmes often reproduce Western-centric political imaginations of planning, which in turn reproduce urban inequality. Many educational institutions across the global South, for example, continue teaching colonial agendas and fail to recognise everyday planning practices in the way cities are built and managed. This article contributes to a better understanding of the relation between planning education and urban inequalities by critically exploring the distribution of regional and global higher education networks and their role in de-colonising planning. The analysis is based on a literature review, quantitative and qualitative data from planning and planning education networks, as well as interviews with key players within them. The article scrutinises the geography of these networks to bring to the fore issues of language, colonial legacies and the dominance of capital cities, which, among others, currently work against more plural epistemologies and praxes. Based on a better understanding of the networked field of urban planning in higher education and ongoing efforts to open up new political imaginations and methodologies, the article suggests emerging room for manoeuvre to foster planner’s capabilities to shape urban equality at scale.

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Messy Maps: Qualitative GIS for Urban Flood Resilience

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-1807 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Faith Taylor ◽

James Millington ◽

Ezekiel Jacob ◽

Bruce Malamud ◽

Mark Pelling

Keyword(s):

Urban Planning ◽

Spatial Data ◽

Informal Settlement ◽

Global South ◽

Spatial Knowledge ◽

Urban Flood ◽

Qualitative Gis ◽

Local Experience ◽

Data Infrastructures ◽

Spatial Locations

<p>We present a methodology to include qualitative aspects of flood resilience such as emotion, social connections and experience into urban planning using qualitative GIS. The geographic information system (GIS) has become ubiquitous in urban planning and disaster risk reduction, but often results in resilience being conceptualised and deployed in highly technocratic and quantitative ways. Yet in the urban Global South, where the rate of informal growth often outstrips our ability to collect spatial data, the knowledge infrastructures used for resilience planning leave little room for participation and consideration of local experience. This presentation outlines two interlinked projects (&#8216;Why we Disagree about Resilience&#8217; and the follow-on &#8216;Expressive Mapping of Resilient Futures&#8217;) experimenting with qualitative GIS methodologies to map resilience as defined by informal settlement residents. We show examples from two case study cities, Nairobi (Kenya) and Cape Town (South Africa), with applicability across the urban Global South. Four map layers were generated: (i) flood footprints showing the detailed spatial knowledge of floods generated by locals; (ii) georeferenced, narrated 360&#176; StorySpheres capturing differing perspectives about a space; (iii) spatial social network maps showing residents connections to formal and informal actors before and during floods; (iv) multimedia pop-ups communicating contextual details missing from traditional GIS maps. We show that for informal settlements, many locations and aspects of resilience have vague or imprecise spatial locations, and that placing markers on a map makes them visible in ways that planners can begin to engage with. We discuss challenges such as privacy, legacy and participation. Although challenges remain, we found openness by city-level actors to use qualitative forms of evidence, and that the contextual detail aided their retention and understanding of resilience. The &#8216;messy&#8217; maps we present here illustrate that in the era of big data and metrics, there is a space for qualitative understanding of resilience, and that existing knowledge and spatial data infrastructures have potential to be more inclusive and holistic.</p>

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The Case for a Southern Perspective in Planning Theory

International Journal of E-Planning Research ◽

10.4018/ijepr.2014010103 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 23-37 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Vanessa Watson

Keyword(s):

Urban Planning ◽

Informal Settlement ◽

Global South ◽

Normative Theory ◽

Planning Theory ◽

Recent Interest ◽

Global North ◽

Material Conditions

In a number of disciplines scholars are questioning the relevance of theoretical positions which claim general and global applicability, yet are grounded in assumptions about social and material conditions which are more specific to a global North context. This paper focuses on the recent interest in urban planning theory to develop explanatory and normative theory that directly addresses the problems and issues of cities in the global South. It suggests a number of starting assumptions, very different from those that inform much current planning theory, which need to inspire the development of planning thought with a global South orientation. These are illustrated through an example of state-society conflict in an informal settlement. While there is certainly a case for developing a global south perspective in planning theory, it is also important to specify the limitations on such an exercise to avoid the trap of creating new theoretical binaries.

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