At the dawn of the new millennium, humanity is rapidly approaching a significant but insufficiently acknowledged milestone: by 2007, UN demographers say, more than half the world’s population will live in cities.1 On a scale that dwarfs previous experience, urban … Continue reading “Introduction: GLOBAL CITIES OF THE SOUTH”
Issue: Issue 081 Global Cities South
Global Cities of the South
The Urbanization of Empire: MEGACITIES AND THE LAWS OF CHAOS
mike davisThe great colonial empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, brutal engines for the extraction of rents, crops, and minerals from tropical countrysides. Colonial cities and entrepôts, although often vast, sprawling, and dynamic, were demographically rather … Continue reading “The Urbanization of Empire: MEGACITIES AND THE LAWS OF CHAOS”
Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City
Ashley DawsonCity air makes you free. This medieval German maxim referring to the city as a haven from the harsh laws of feudal vassalage might serve as an ironic epigraph for Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco. Near the beginning of Chamoiseau’s third … Continue reading “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City”
The Oracle in the City: BELIEFS, PRACTICES, AND SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES
rossana reguilloAlong with the process of cultural globalization, there have emerged various tribalisms, through which many social actors are rediscovering their sense of life and activating mechanisms of identity and memory. At the moment when the idea of the national is … Continue reading “The Oracle in the City: BELIEFS, PRACTICES, AND SYMBOLIC GEOGRAPHIES”
Popular Capitalism and Subalternity: STREET COMEDIANS IN LIMA
victor vichThe street was one of the great economic scenes of the 1980s in Peru. Popular sectors of society responded with great vitality to the generalized economic crisis, the inequality of opportunities, the lack of employment, and the clear aspiration to … Continue reading “Popular Capitalism and Subalternity: STREET COMEDIANS IN LIMA”
Provincializing the Global City: FROM BOMBAY TO MUMBAI
rashmi varmaThis song runs through Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as the theme song of migrants who cross oceans only to discover that their hearts remain inviolably Indian.1 Gibreel Farishta, the Bombay fi lm star in Rushdie’s novel, sings this … Continue reading “Provincializing the Global City: FROM BOMBAY TO MUMBAI”
Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria
brian larkinBeside Kofar Nassarawa, a gate to the mud wall that once ringed the Muslim heart of Kano, a city in northern Nigeria, there is a mai gyara, a mechanic who repairs scooters and motorbikes. On this atrophying wall in the … Continue reading “Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria”
Harlem
gayatri chakravorty spivakAlice Attie showed me her photographs of Harlem. The images haunted me and interpellated me as a New Yorker. A month before this, twenty-one photographs of the base of the eleventh-century Brihadiswara temple in Thanjavur, taken in 1858 by a … Continue reading “Harlem”