Shack/ Slum Dwellers International have just launched their new website www.sdinet.org
Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) is an international network of federations of the urban poor who share ideas and experiences, and support one another in gaining access to adequate land, infrastructure and housing.
The helicopter craze currently sweeping Sao Paulo is also a tale of two radically different cities. Above, the space-age world where flying news teams trawl the skies for their next scoop and wealthy executives glide effortlessly between luxury condominiums, beach resorts and business meetings; below, the gridlocked mayhem where the vast majority of residents crush together in an orgy of congestion and motorcycle crashes.
A new report from the Centre for Cities and Washington's Brookings Institution has found that the USA has a lot to learn from Britain's urban renaissance. But while British politicians and officials have always been keen to go on the hunt for policy ideas from the States, US politicians don't always follow suit. US mayors - and the next US administration - should look more closely at British policy ideas, to help American cities compete in the future.
"As the United States chooses its next President, we should do more to export our successful urban policies to the US - especially on sustainable growth. US cities could learn useful lessons from our track record of avoiding excessive sprawl and supporting low-income families." Dermot Finch
See also: Americans migrate back to the cities
Cockburn: 'Rogue Projects' in New Left Review
"Forty years ago the topic of slums was a lot hotter in the United States than it is now."
"Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s vice president, advised a sense of distance from urban policy: ‘If you’ve seen one city slum you’ve seen them all’, he nonchalantly declared. Enlightened opinion duly looked the other way, and that is how it has been ever since. "
Loïc Wacquant, author of Urban Outcasts, will be lecturing in London and Manchester at the end of May.
"Drawing on a wealth of original fieldwork, surveys and historical data, Urban Outcasts casts new light on the explosive conjunction of mounting misery and stupendous affluence evident in the cities of advanced and advancing countries throughout the globe."
The lectures will be at the Royal Society of Arts on 28th May and Manchester University on 29th May (details to be posted).
Urban Outcasts was the subject of a special feature of a recent edition of CITY.
Jaime Lerner's 'urban revolution' successfully transformed a congested, grimy, crime-ridden city into a world-renowned model of green living and social innovation.
'Taking care of a city is a process that you start, and then give the population space to respond.'
Exemplar Open City talk at Somerset House Monday 31st March
The latest newsletter from the Ecologies of Urban Learning program at NYTS.
Gentrification, depression, Harlem and more.
Download eol_newsletter_volume_2_issue_2_hot_off_the_press.htm
Scarred by violence and political repression, Brazil's shanty towns have responded with an outpouring of 
art, music and film. But as "favela chic" becomes all the rage in the west are we in danger of glamorising slum life?
" Usually, the noise that governs favelas is the sound of gunfire. What you hear in AfroReggae is a sonic revolt: the regime of sounds that were suffocated by bullets returning to be heard. There are many different sounds . . . it's not a cacophony but an aesthetic posture intimately linked to an experience of favela life."
Advancing God's Reign in Our Cities CONFERENCE BROCHURE 15-18 April 2008 Chicago
The Congress on Urban Ministry, organised by SCUPE - the Seminary Consortium on Urban Pastoral Education , is a biennial event of Christians engaged in and passionate about urban ministry. This year the Congress will be focusing on Creating Redemptive Communities, Releasing Prophetic Imagination through Story, and Engaging in Justice, Reconciliation and Restoration.
Hip-hop for peaceScarred by violence and political repression, Brazil's shanty towns have responded with an outpouring of art, music and film. But as "favela chic" becomes all the rage in the west are we in danger of glamorising slum life?
John M. Hagedorn: World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture
Looking closely at gang formation in three world cities-Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Capetown-he discovers that some gangs have institutionalized as a strategy to confront a hopeless cycle of poverty, racism, and oppression.
Thomas J. Campanella: The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World
The Concrete Dragon provides both a timely and critical overview of China's present as well as a comparison to previous periods of rapid urbanization elsewhere in the world especially that of the U.S., a nation that once itself set global records for the speed and scale of its urban ambitions.
Edgar Pieterse: City Futures: Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development (Global Issues)
This book is a powerful indictment of the current consensus on how to deal with urban challenges. Pieterse argues that the current 'shelter for all' and 'urban good governance' policies treat only the symptoms, not the causes of the problem.
Adrian Favell: Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe
What does it mean to move to, in and between Europe's changing cities?
Paul Talling: Derelict London
Documenting unregenerate and unregenerated spaces.
: Urbanatomy: Shanghai 2008
More than a guidebook - a riot of pictures, comment and insight.
Catherine E. Wilson: The Politics of Latino Faith: Religion, Identity, and Urban Community
A systematic look at the spiritual, social, and cultural influence Latino faith-based organizations have provided in American life.
Ronald E. Peters: Urban Ministry: An Introduction
Introduction to the particular challenges and opportunities of congregational ministry in urban settings.
Loïc Wacquant: Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality
Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same.
Price & Benton-Short: Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities
The book focuses not only on cities with long-established diverse populations, such as New York, Toronto, and Sydney, but also on lesser known established gateway cities such as Birmingham (UK) and Amsterdam, and the emerging gateways of Johannesburg, Washington, D.C., Singapore, and Dublin.
Prakash: Spaces of the Modern City Imaginaries, Politics and Everyday Life: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life
This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg.
Thierstein & Forster (eds.): The Image and the Region: Making Mega-City Regions Visible!
A great deal is written about the mega-city region yet it is still below the radar for politicians, activists and citizens. What potential is there in making the MCR a normative concept and space for collective action?
Daviel Groody: A Promised Land, a Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration
The crossing of geographical borders confronts us with choices: between national security and human insecurity; between sovereign national rights and human rights; between citizenship and discipleship.
Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic: The Endless City
Across the globe there is an unstoppable march to the cities, powered by new economic realities.
Gerald West: Reading Other-wise: Socially Engaged Biblical Scholars Reading with Their Local Communities (Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies)
Global perspectives on reading in community. Includes Kari Latvus on the Bible in Bristish urban theology.
Roger Gastman: Street World: Urban Culture from Five Continents (Street Graphics / Street Art)
From juggernauts like hip-hop and punk to much smaller but equally inspiring subcultures endemic to the streets of the Brazilian mega-cities, South African townships and the crowds of Mumbai, "Street World" is the only book to document it all.
Phil Wood: The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage
The Intercultural City analyses the relationship of urban policy to policies on cultural diversity, principally in the UK, but also drawing upon original research in North America, Europe and Australasia.
Loretta Lees: Gentrification
The gentrification of urban areas has accelerated across the globe to become a central engine of urban development...
Tom Wright: The Cross and the Colliery
Based on sermons originally delivered by Bishop Tom Wright during Easter 2007, this is a book for Lent that uses the story of a coal-mining town in northern England as a modern parable for loss and rebirth.
Anne Power: City Survivors: Bringing Up Children in Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods
Seen through the eyes of parents, mainly mothers, "City Survivors" tells the eye-opening story of what it is like to bring up children in troubled city neighbourhoods.
Mike Davis & Daneil Monk: Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism
Davis and Monk take on thye real and imagined sopaces of the the neoliberal city.
J & K Hammett: The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?
The suburbanized frabric of New`York is beginning to fray the once tightly woven and highly diverse urban fabric of the city.
NP Marwell: Bargaining for Brooklyn Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City
"Bargaining for Brooklyn" widens the lens, examining the community organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.
Jeremy Seabrook: Cities (Small Guides to Big Issues)
Every year tens of millions of people abandon rural areas of the South for life in the city. With education, health care and even safe water in short supply, cities risk becoming sites of violent conflict for future generations. And yet world governments are doing little to address these demographic shifts.
Petrella & Althus-Reid: Another Possible World (Reclaiming Liberation Theology)
"Another Possible World" is the book resulting from the first World Forum on liberation theology that took place in 2005 in Brazil.
Gavin Stamp: Britain's Lost Cities
Reproduced in this haunting volume are hundreds of top-quality photographs of cities from Plymouth to Dundee, all of streets and buildings that are gone for ever. Alternately fascinating, enraging and heartbreaking, this is an extraordinary evocation of Britain's architectural past, and a much-needed reminder of the importance of preserving our heritage.
Paul H. Ballard & Lesley Husselbee : Community and Ministry: An Introduction to Community Work in a Christian Context
a thorough and professional introduction to the subject, and includes: what is community?; community work and mission; models of community work; ethnic, cultural and religious diversity; the local authority and voluntary agencies; working with volunteers; and spirituality in community participation.
Anthony Reddie & Michael N. Jagessar: Black Theology in Britain: A Reader (Cross Cultural Theologies)
This text seeks to outline the development of Black theology in Britain from 18th century through to our contemporary era. By means of re-investigating popular texts and previously unpublished groundbreaking material, the editors offer a comprehensive and challenging interpretation of the development of an eclectic and distinctive voice that is Black theology in Britain.
