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Contemporary pedagogy suggests children's growth and development takes place through experiences. The task of the kindergarten designer and educator is to provide authentic, stimulating and meaningful environments, full of rich and active hands-on experiences that will facilitate each child's access to the natural or human worlds, until they have assimilated everything they need to thrive and grow. This book is intended to uncover the relationship between early childhood space design and childhood development through an exciting selection of kindergarten, childcare, and nursery (crèche) designs from around the world. As a standout, the work focuses on the details of indoor spaces and outdoor playgrounds. Each case includes highlighted commentary by the designer, explaining how their work helps children to shape their own personal curriculum. Case studies include interviews with architects that present valuable insights. Highly illustrated in full-color throughout, this book hopes to spark the design inspirations of kindergarten architects and interior designers, as well as outdoor playground designers, on how to design children's education and care centers. --Amazon

In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city's upper-class residents, the city's settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on \"time\" and with \"pressure.\" Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city's infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers' efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state's neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.

Using a randomized evaluation in Kenya, we measure health impacts of spring protection, an investment that improves source water quality. We also estimate households' valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water, which limits incentives for private investment. Spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66%, but household water quality improves less, due to recontamination. Child diarrhea falls by one quarter. Travel-cost based revealed preference estimates of households' valuations are much smaller than both stated preference valuations and health planners' valuations, and are consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic. We estimate that private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to above-marginal-cost pricing, private property would function better at higher income levels or under water scarcity, and alternative institutions could yield Pareto improvements.

Using Swedish micro data, the paper examines the impact of local public services on community choice. The choice of community is modelled as a choice between a discrete set of alternatives. It is found that, given taxes, high spending on child care attracts migrants. Less conclusive results are obtained with respect to the role of spending on education and elderly care. High local taxes deter migrants. Relaxing the independence of the irrelevant alternatives assumption, by estimating a mixed logit model, has a significant impact on the results.

The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was a catastrophe not only for the loss of life it caused, but also because it destroyed the very thin layer of state administrative capacity that was in place in the country. This article argues that the fragility of the Haitian state institutions was exacerbated by international strategies that promoted NGOs as substitutes for the state. These strategies have generated a vicious circle that, while solving immediate logistical problems, ended up weakening Haiti's institutions. However, the article does not call for an overarching condemnation of NGOs. Instead, it explores two cases of community-based NGOs, Partners In Health and Fonkoze, that have contributed to creating durable social capital, generated employment and provided functioning services to the communities where they operated. The article shows that organisations that are financially independent and internationally connected, embrace a needs-based approach to their activities and share a long-term commitment to the communities within which they operate can contribute to bringing about substantial improvement for people living in situations of extreme poverty. It concludes that in the aftermath of a crisis of the dimension of the January earthquake it is crucial to channel support towards organisations that show this type of commitment.

On 15 November 2007 Cyclone Sidr, a category 4 storm, struck the southwestern coast of Bangladesh. Despite early cyclone warnings and evacuation orders for coastal residents, thousands of individuals stayed in their homes. This study examines dissemination of the warning, assesses the warning responses, and explores the reasons why many residents did not evacuate. Field data collected from 257 Sidr survivors in four severely affected coastal districts revealed that more than three-fourths of all respondents were aware of the cyclone warnings and evacuation orders. Despite the sincere efforts of the Bangladesh government, however, lapses in cyclone warnings and evacuation procedures occurred. Field data also revealed several reasons why evacuation orders were not followed. The reasons fell into three broad groups: those involving shelter characteristics; the attributes of the warning message itself; and the respondents' characteristics. Based on our findings, we recommend improved cyclone warnings and utilization of public shelters for similar events in the future.

ABSTRACT  I use the concept of “engaged anthropology” to frame a discussion of how “spatializing culture” uncovers systems of exclusion that are hidden or naturalized and thus rendered invisible to other methodological approaches. “Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology” is doubly meant: to claim more intellectual and professional space for engagement and to propose that anthropology include the dimension of space as a theoretical construct. I draw on three fieldwork examples to illustrate the value of the approach: (1) a Spanish American plaza, reclaimed from a Eurocentric past, for indigenous groups and contemporary cultural interpretation; (2) Moore Street Market, an enclosed Latino food market in Brooklyn, New York, reclaimed for a translocal set of social relations rather than a gentrified redevelopment project; (3) gated communities in Texas and New York and cooperatives in New York, reclaiming public space and confronting race and class segregation created by neoliberal enclosure and securitization. ABSTRACTO  En este artículo uso el concepto de antropología comprometida para enmarcar una discusión sobre cómo “la espacialización de la cultura” desencubre sistemas de exclusión que quedan invisivilizados o naturalizados por otros encuadres metodológicos. “Reclamar espacio para una antropología comprometida” se plantea en su doble sentido‐reclamar más espacio intelectual y profesional para el compromiso social, y proponer que la antropología debe incluir el concepto de espacio como un constructo teórico central de igual importancia que el concepto de tiempo. Utilizo tres ejemplos de trabajo de campo para ilustrar el valor del encuadre propuesto. El primero reconsidera la etnohistoria de la plaza hispanoamericana para rescatar el espacio de la plaza de su injustificado pasado eurocéntrico y devolverlo a los grupos indígenas y la interpretación cultural contemporánea. El segundo explora el mercado de Moore Street, mercado Latino en Brooklyn, Nueva York, para reclamar este espacio urbano comercial como un conjunto translocal de relaciones sociales en vez de como un proyecto de renovación urbana gentrificado. El tercero examina residentes que viven en proyectos de vivienda privada tales como comunidades cerradas en Texas y New York y complejos de apartamentos cooperativos en Nueva York, para rescatar el espacio público y confrontar el racismo y la segregación de clase creados por el encierro neoliberal y el giro hacia la seguridad. ABSTRAIT  Dans cet article, le concept d’anthropologie engagée me permet de discuter comment une approche spatiale de la culture révèle des systèmes d’exclusion cachés ou naturalisés qui les rendent invisibles à d’autres approches méthodologiques. “Revendiquer l’espace pour une anthropologie engagée” se comprend dans un double sens: celui de réclamer plus d’espace intellectuel et professionnel pour l’engagement et celui de proposer l’espace comme une construction théorique que l’anthropologie devrait adopter. Je me base sur trois exemple de terrain pour illustrer l’intérêt de cette approche. Le premier revient sur l’ethno‐histoire des places publiques hispano‐américaines afin de soustraire l’espace de ces places à un héritage eurocentrique artificiel et ainsi de le restituer aux groupes indigènes dans les interprétations culturelles contemporaines. Le second explore Moore Street Market, un marché alimentaire couvert Latino‐américain à Brooklyn, New York. Il pose cet espace commercial urbain comme un ensemble de relations sociales translocales plutôt que comme un projet de rénovation et de gentrification. Le troisième exemple questionne les résidents des programmes de logements privés tels que les “gated communities” au Texas et New York et les co‐propriétés au Texas et à New York, afin de reconquérir l’espace public et d’affronter le racisme et la ségrégation de classes produite par le séparatisme néolibéral et la titrisation. 在這篇論文中我我以應用人類學的概念來探討我空間化文化我的研究方法如何能揭露透過其他研究取徑我常難以或無法呈現之社會排除現象我因此本文中的我爭取應用人類學的空間我具雙重涵義—一方面企圖為人類學在學術界與專業實務界爭取更多應用的空間我另一方面則是提議人類學應包含空間面向之理論架構我我以三個田野研究案例來闡明此方法的價值。第一個研究重探拉丁美洲廣場的族裔歷史我發現過去由不合理的歐洲中心歷史所界定的廣場我實應屬於當代在地的住民我且應由他們的文化來詮釋廣場的意義。第二個研究探討摩爾街市場‐一處位於紐約市布魯克林區的拉丁裔室內食品市場我我認為應讓該市場維持為一個集結跨地域社會關係的都市商業空間我而非被縉紳化的更新案所取代。第三個研究探討住在德州的門禁式社區我以及紐約的公寓大廈等私有集合住宅居民之生活經驗我以重申公共空間的重要我並且正視自自由主義式的空間圍塑與警衛保全我所導致之種族歧視與階級分化問題。

The story of water in the creation of urban networks is well known for its feats of engineering, for its relationship to public health and cleanliness, and for its battles over municipalization. But it also represents a chapter in the transformation of politics. Water utilities were a source of political mobilization, leading middle-class ratepayers to assert their rights as householders and citizens. This article begins with two central players in the story: the consumer defense leagues in late Victorian London and Sheffield. It then follows the conflicts over water through a period of drought in the 1890s and into the early twentieth century. Adapted from the source document.

This article focuses ethnographically on Americans and technologies ojdrinking water, as tokens of and vehicles for health, agency, and surprising kinds of community. Journalists and water scholars have argued that bottled water is a material concomitant of privatization and alienation in U.S. society. But, engaging Latour, this research shows that water technologies and the groups they assemble, are plural. Attention to everyday entwining of workplace lives with drinking fountains, single-serve bottles, and spring water coolers shows us several different quests, some individualized, some alienated, but some seeking health via public, collective care, acknowledgment of stakeholding, and community organizing. Focused on water practices on a college campus, in the roaring 1990s and increasingly sober 2000s in the context of earlier U.S. water histories of inclusion and exclusion, I draw on ethnographic research from the two years that led up to the recession and the presidential election of 2008. I argue for understanding of water value through attention to water use, focusing both on the social construction of water and the use of water for social construction.