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\"It is well known that the world is transitioning to an irrevocable urban future whose epicentre has moved into the cities of Asia and Africa. What is less clear is how this will be managed and deployed as a multi-polar world system is being born. The full implications of this challenge cry out to be understood because city building (and retrofitting) cannot but be an undertaking entangled in profound societal and cultural shifts. In this highly original account, renowned urban sociologists AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse offer a call for action based fundamentally on the detail of people's lives. Urban regions are replete with residents who are compelled to come up with innovative ways to maintain or extend livelihoods, whose makeshift character is rarely institutionalized into a fixed set of practices, locales or organizational forms. This novel analytical approach reveals a more complex relationship between people, the state and other agents than has previously been understood. As the authors argue, we need adequate concepts and practices to grasp the composition and intricacy of these shifting efforts to make visible new political possibilities for action and social justice in cities across Asia and Africa\"-- Provided by publisher.

In The Concrete Plateau , Andrew Grant examines the ways that urbanization has extended into the Tibetan Plateau. Many people still think of Tibetans as not being urban, or that if they do live in cities, this means that they have lost something. Much of this is relates to the expectation that urbanization can only erode essential aspects of Tibetan culture. Grant pushes back against this notion through his in-depth exploration of Tibetans' experiences with urban life in the growing city of Xining, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau. Grant shows how Tibetans' actions to sustain their community challenge China's civilizing machine : a product of state-led urbanization that seeks to marginalize ethnic and indigenous groups. In their homes, neighborhoods, and businesses, Tibetans' assertion of cultural identity and modification of the built environment has prevented their assimilation into China's national urban project. The Concrete Plateau presents insights into the politics of urban development not only in Tibet and China, but to contexts of urban diversity all around world. Its findings are important for studies of urban development in the Global South where in-migrating ethnic and indigenous groups are negotiating top-down urban projects. Grant's book offers a profound rethinking of urbanization, rurality, culture, and the politics of place.

In the late 1990s, planning authorities in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi pushed the imaginary line between city and country several kilometres westward, engulfing dozens of rural settlements. This book explores how one such village, Hoa Muc, rapidly transitioned into an urban neighbourhood, and the state regulations and early urban changes that drove this transformation. The compelling story of this single village is both a portrait of a population that has endured despite drastic upheavals and a new analytical window into Vietnam's ongoing urban transition.

Climate change is a major source of concern in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and migration is often understood as one of several strategies used by households to respond to changes in climate and environmental conditions, including extreme weather events. This study focuses on the link between climate change and migration. Most micro-level studies measure climate change either by the incidences of extreme weather events or by variation in temperature or rainfall. A few studies have found that formal and informal institutions as well as policies also affect migration. Institutions that make government more responsive to households (for example through public spending) discourage both international and domestic migration in the aftermath of extreme weather events. Migration is often an option of last resort after vulnerable rural populations attempting to cope with new and challenging circumstances have exhausted other options such as eating less, selling assets, or removing children from school. This study is based in large part on new data collected in 2011 in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and the Republic of Yemen. The surveys were administered by in-country partners to a randomly selected set of 800 households per country. It is also important to emphasize that neither the household survey results nor the findings from the qualitative focus groups are meant to be representative of the five countries in which the work was carried, since only a few areas were surveyed in each country. This report is organized as follows: section one gives synthesis. Section two discusses household perceptions about climate change and extreme weather events. Section three focuses on migration as a coping mechanisms and income diversification strategy. Section four examines other coping and adaptation strategies. Section five discusses perceptions about government and community programs.

Background Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRDs) in Asian countries are a growing concern in terms of morbidity and mortality. However, a systematic understanding of the increasing age-adjusted mortality rate of chronic respiratory disease (CRD) and its associated factors is not readily available for many Asian countries. We aimed to determine country-level factors affecting CRD mortality using a panel error correction model. Methods Based on data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017, we estimated the trends and distribution of CRD mortality for selected Asian countries from 2010 to 2017. Furthermore, we evaluated the relationship between CRD mortality and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, average years of schooling, urbanization, and pollutant emission (PM2.5 concentration) using a fixed-effect model. We corrected the estimates for heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation through Prais-Winsten adjustment along with robust standard error. Results Between 2010 and 2017, approximately 21.4 million people died from chronic respiratory diseases in the countries studied. Age-standardized crude mortality rate from CRDs in the period had minimum and maximum values of 8.19 (Singapore in 2016) and 155.42 (North Korea in 2010) per 100,000 population, respectively. The coefficients corrected for autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity based on the final model of our study (Prais-Winsten), showed that all explanatory variables were statistically significant ( p  < 0.001). The model shows that the 1% increase in GDP per capita results in a 20% increase (0.203) in the CRD mortality rate and that a higher concentration of air pollution is also positively associated with the CRD deaths (0.00869). However, an extra year of schooling reduces the mortality rate by 4.79% (− 0.0479). Further, rate of urbanization is negatively associated with the CRD death rate (− 0.0252). Conclusions Our results indicate that both socioeconomic and environmental factors impact CRD mortality rates. Mortality due to CRD increases with rising GDP per capita and decreases with the percentage of the total population residing in urban areas. Further, mortality increases with greater exposure to PM2.5. Also, higher years of schooling mitigate rising CRD mortality rates, showing that education can act as a safety net against CRD mortality. These results are an outcome of sequential adjustments in the final model specification to correct for heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

Promoting farming work is crucial for sustainable economic development in Asian-Pacific rural areas. How to promote rural entrepreneurship has recently become a critical issue in agricultural education. This article reports the results of two subsequent studies. The first study confirmed the factor structures of the five-factor model of personality, the general self-efficacy scale, and the entrepreneurial intention scale. The second study tested the mediating effect of self-efficacy on the relationship between personality traits and entrepreneurial intention among agricultural students. The results indicate that entrepreneurial intention comprises two dimensions: conviction and preparation. Accordingly, the mediation model of self-efficacy is partially supported. Extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness reliably predict both conviction and preparation, whereas neuroticism does not. In addition to the indirect effects, both openness and negative emotion exert a direct effect on entrepreneurial intention in agricultural students.

The development of projects for new eco-cities is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon. Alleged eco-cities are being built across a variety of spaces via processes of urbanisation triggering substantial environmental, social and economic impacts. This article investigates how new eco-city projects interpret and practice urban sustainability by focusing on the policy context that underpins their development. The article argues that projects for new eco-cities are shaped in loci by policy agendas tailored around specific economic and political targets. In these terms, the ideas and strategies of urban sustainability adopted by eco-city developers are understood as reflections of broader policy priorities. The case study employed in this article, Masdar City, reveals how the Emirati eco-city initiative is the product of local agendas seeking economic growth via urbanisation to preserve the political institutions of Abu Dhabi. Following the economic imperatives set by the ruling class, the Masdar City project interprets sustainability as ecological modernisation and practices urban environmentalism almost exclusively in economic terms. The article shows how the developers of Masdar City capitalise on sustainability by building an urban platform to develop and commercialise clean-tech products, and concludes that the Emirati alleged eco-city is an example of urban eco-modernisation: a high-tech urban development informed by market analysis rather than ecological studies.

The study of regional trends in the rural-urban fertility gradient helps us to understand the pace of completion of the fertility transition and the geography of urban growth in the global South. We question whether the hypothesized inverted U-shaped evolution in rural excess fertility is confirmed in four developing regions, and investigate the underlying fertility dynamics by place of residence. Using multiple surveys for 60 developing countries, we analyze long-term rural and urban trends in cohort fertility. The regional comparison is controlled for the international heterogeneity in the stages attained in the fertility transition and the context of urbanization. We found a clearly inverted U-shaped trend in the rural-urban fertility gradient in Latin America, the Middle East and Northern Africa. In Asia, rural excess fertility remained limited. In sub-Saharan Africa it increased monotonically until the most recent cohorts. These differences stem from variations in the urban-to-rural diffusion of the onset of fertility transition and, in sub-Saharan Africa, from a slower pace of decline in rural areas.

Globalizing Migration History presents a new universal method to quantify and qualify cross-cultural migrations, which makes it possible to detect regional trends and explain differences in migration patterns across the globe in the last half millennium.

Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China examines the key mechanisms operating at the grassroots level in China that contribute to urban development and increased public support for the legitimacy and authority of the Chinese state. Beibei Tang uncovers new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance since the 2000s to reveal the significant factors that contribute to regime survival. Tang introduces the concept of hybrid authoritarianism, a governance mechanism an authoritarian state employs to produce governance legitimacy, public support, and regime sustainability. Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space between state and society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and in this context, ultimately strengthens CCP leadership. Tang documents processes of hybrid authoritarianism through her focus on various types of urban neighborhoods, including new urban middle-class neighborhoods, and the increasing urbanization of the countryside. Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China provides a conceptual framework that avoids scholarly approaches that tend to reify either one-party autocracy or Western-centric notions of democracy.