Flexible, easy to use, just enough detail--and now the number-one best seller.

This book highlights the experiences of 14 high poverty communities in the rural South that accepted the invitation to be part of the Turning the Tide on Poverty (Tide) initiative. While history would suggest that impoverished places have limited capacity to make good things happen, Tide demonstrated otherwise. This volume is a testament to the positive work that can be realized when people from all walks of life are accorded the opportunity to discuss, deliberate, and act on strategies designed to improve the lives of rural people and places in the South. The message is clear: when local residents are provided a safe space to weigh in on local issues and asked to give respectful consideration to the views of others in their community, they create pathways for spurring positive changes. Simply put, civic engagement propels people to do more for their community and instils in them a sense of hope for what can be accomplished when local people work together. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Community Development.

The aim of this monograph is to show the contexts in which ways of life are conducted in late modernity, the dimensions of life in late modernity we can identify and how we can descibe and understand them. The fundamental starting point of the monograph is the thesis that late modernity is characterized, amongst other factors, by large number of life forms and ways of life. The monograph is introduced with a chapter entitled Ways of Life in Late Modernity, in which the author attempts to define the concepts of way of life, lifestyle and life architecture, to outline different theoretical approaches to understanding way of life, and to define some characteristics of late modern ways of life. The monograph is further divided into three parts.

* Updated and much expanded edition of the authors' 1992 classic Environmental Problems in Third World Cities * Comprehensive account of the health- and life- threatening environmental conditions in which a growing proportion of the world's people live * Ideal as a textbook and for professionals and interested general readers * 1st edition widely adopted on urban geography, development studies, environmental courses Most of the world's urban population and most of the large and rapidly growing cities are in developing countries. Often poorly governed, their conditions produce millions of preventable deaths and extensive disease. This book describes these cities' environmental problems and how they affect health, local ecosystems and global cycles. It analyzes the causes: the failure of governments to supply clean water and implement existing measures, or land-owning structures that marginalize the poor. It also highlights the innovative ways in which problems are being tackled, showing solutions are available and the action needed by cities, local governments and community organizations.

The experience of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians is an instructive model for scholars and provides a model for multicultural tribal development that may be of interest to recognized and nonrecognized Indian nations in the United States and elsewhere.

'This is surely the most impressive and important publication to come out of the UN system for many years.' Peter Adamson, founder, New Internationalist, and author and researcher of UNICEF's The State of the World's Children from 1980 to 1995 The world's governments agreed at the Millennium Summit to halve, by 2015, the number of people who lack access to safe water. With rapidly growing urban populations the challenge is immense. Water and Sanitation in the World's Cities is a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the problems and how they can be addressed. This influential publication by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) sets out in detail the scale of inadequate provision of water and sanitation. It describes the impacts on health and economic performance, showing the potential gains of remedial action; it analyses the proximate and underlying causes of poor provision and identifies information gaps affecting resource allocation; it outlines the consequences of further deterioration; and it explains how resources and institutional capacities - public, private and community - can be used to deliver proper services through integrated water resource management.

Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.