Search

The modern slum is as prevalent as its stereotypes. Today, a slum is often understood to be a place of extreme poverty in the developing world-a place disordered, lacking the basic amenities of life, traumatized by violence, and perpetuated by dysfunctional families and disaffected extremists. Yet the word “slum” was not coined in the twenty-first century's developing world or its recent past. The word emerged in early nineteenth-century London, and its use expanded as modernization created what is now the developed world and its client territories. The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum explores the history of the modern slum, connecting nineteenth-century iterations through multiple pathways to its contemporary existence. With chapters by more than twenty scholars, this Handbook brings an array of important and original perspectives and methodologies to bear on slums, real and imagined. Its analysis ranges across Europe, North America, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Handbook probes the impact of gender and race on urban social disadvantage and traces the development of private and state-sponsored intervention-as well as tourist interest-in urban poverty. It suggests that characterizations of slumland disequilibrium, dysfunctionality, and unsustainability should be offset by evidence of make-do enterprise, strategic determination, resilience, homeliness, and neighborliness. Drawing upon anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history, politics, sociology and urban planning, the Handbook delves into households and communities whose existence has been hidden by stereotypes.

Socio-legal research on the legal experiences of the poor reflects an understanding of the close connection between economic inequality and law. The first two parts of this volume illustrate general analytical approaches to law and poverty. The remaining parts include essays which examine more specific issues such as race and gender, access to law, legal consciousness and social change. Research on the relationships between poverty, inequality and governance still leaves many questions unanswered but the work presented here reflects the important contribution that sociolegal research makes to the ongoing debate.

Armut in allen Formen zu beenden ist das erklärte Ziel der Vereinten Nationen. Aber was ist Armut? Und wer ist arm? Ist Armut messbar? Wie lässt sich Armut bekämpfen? Philipp Lepenies führt kundig und kompetent in ein komplexes Thema ein, das die Welt bewegt. Sein Buch stellt die wichtigsten Epochen, Ereignisse, Reaktionen und Konzepte vor, die für das Verständnis der aktuellen Armutsdebatten notwendig sind.

With a focus on how trade, foreign investment, commercial arbitration and financial regulation rules affect impoverished individuals, Poverty and the International Economic Legal System examines the relationship between the legal rules of the international economic law system and states'obligations to reduce poverty. The contributors include leading practitioners, practice-oriented scholars and legal theorists, who discuss the human aspects of global economic activity without resorting to either overly dogmatic human rights approaches or technocratic economic views. The essays extend beyond development discussions by encouraging further efforts to study, improve and develop legal mechanisms for the benefit of the world's poor and challenging traditionally de-personified legal areas to engage with their real-world impacts.