There is increasing appreciation in the social sciences that context is an important element in understanding social, economic, cultural, political and demographic processes. An important element in context is the type of settlement in which people live and work and so, it is vital to be able to categorise people into particular settlements types. This book brings together a leading team of social scientists to present the latest information on urbanization around the world, highlighting examples of development patterns that are not adequately captured by the UN's type of reporting systems and drawing attention to other ways of representing current trends.

Eating locally and developing an urban-rural food continuum is a rapidly evolving movement. Integration of multi-functional forms of agriculture — termed New Forms of Urban Agriculture (NFUA) — could be a critical adaptation to strengthen this movement and for the sustainability of cities. While NFUA have the potential to provide diverse benefits to humans, there is an absence of reliable empirical data on the scale and impact of urban resources on NFUA which has a profound impact on its viability and sustainability. In this book, we shift the focus from how NFUA have potential to impact the urban system to investigate the potential impacts of urban resources on NFUA. Access to resources such as land, labour, clean water, etc. are major barriers to enter the agriculture sector in the cities; the chapters in this book present projects or reviews recent research on the subject from different cities in the world. This edited volume offers critical perspectives from diverse disciplines, expertise, and geographic contexts related to the actual and potential role of urban and peri-urban agriculture in the developing and the developed world where forms, adaptations, and debates around NFUA vary distinctively. Using and urban ecology lens, the book provides empirical evidence of how urban resources of land, water/waste, labour, and biodiversity impact NFUA.

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

Cities are not only home to around half of the global population but also major centers of economic activity and innovation. Yet, so far there has been no consensus of what a city really is. Substantial differences in the way cities, metropolitan, urban, and rural areas are defined across countries hinder robust international comparisons and an accurate monitoring of SDGs. The report Cities in the World: A New Perspective on Urbanisation addresses this void and provides new insights on urbanisation by applying for the first time two new definitions of human settlements to the entire globe: the Degree of Urbanisation and the Functional Urban Area.

Urbanization is one of the major challenges facing China. Of China’s 1.3 billion people, around half still live in rural areas. There has been huge migration from rural areas to cities in recent years, a trend that is likely to continue strong for some time. The strains that this vast migration puts on China’s cities are enormous. This book makes available for the English-speaking reader the results of a large group of research projects undertaken by CDRF, one of China’s leading think tanks, into the details of rural-urban migration, the resulting urban growth and the problems associated with all this. The book goes on to put forward a new strategy, which aims to ensure that China’s urbanization proceeds in an orderly manner and that people and their needs are put at the centre of the strategy. Key parts of the strategy include that 'city clusters' should become the main form of urbanization; that these should be arranged geographically in a pattern of 'two horizontal lines and three vertical lines'; that industrial and employment structures should highlight regional features and diversity; that urban public services should be more equitably distributed; that there should be new forms of urbanization management and city governance to accelerate urbanization and ensure harmonious social development; and that the whole process should be conducted in an ecological, 'green' way.

The trajectory and logic of urban development in post-Mao China have been shaped and defined by the contention between domestic and global capital, central and local state and social actors of different class status and endowment. This urban transformation process of historic proportion entails new rules for distribution and negotiation, novel perceptions of citizenship, as well as room for unprecedented spontaneity and creativity. Based on original research by leading experts, this book offers an updated and nuanced analysis of the new logic of urban governance and its implications.