Over the last few decades the increasingly collaborative work developed among architects, urban planners, artists and media designers has developed a particular landscape of projects that engage information technology as a catalytic tool for expanding, augmenting or altering the public and social interactions in the urban space. Through the projects and prototypes presented, the book aims to dissect the modes in which spatial practitioners operate in the digital city and how information technology and media are tools for place making. Interacting, Integrating, Expanding, Networking and Hacking are the five categories that explore modes of operating in the digital city. The line of inquiry set up through the research framework of the book begins from the reading of the contemporary urban conditions as the shared, the common, the smart, and the networker.

Technology assumes a remarkable importance in contemporary political life. Today, politicians and intellectuals extol the virtues of networking, interactivity and feedback, and stress the importance of new media and biotechnologies for economic development and political innovation. Measures of intellectual productivity and property play an increasingly critical part in assessments of the competitiveness of firms, universities and nation-states. At the same time, contemporary radical politics has come to raise questions about the political preoccupation with technical progress, while also developing a certain degree of technical sophistication itself.In a series of in-depth analyses of topics ranging from environmental protest to intellectual property law, and from interactive science centres to the European Union, this book interrogates the politics of the technological society. Critical of the form and intensity of the contemporary preoccupation with new technology, Political Machines opens up a space for thinking the relation between technical innovation and political inventiveness.>

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How poor migrants shape city politics during urbanization As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum residents in India routinely defy such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities. Drawing on years of pioneering fieldwork in India’s slums, including ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, and experiments, Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil reveal how migrants harness forces of political competition—as residents, voters, community leaders, and party workers—to sow unexpected seeds of accountability within city politics. This multifaceted agency provokes new questions about how political networks form during urbanization. In answering these questions, this book overturns longstanding assumptions about how political machines exploit the urban poor to stifle competition, foster ethnic favoritism, and entrench vote buying. By documenting how poor migrants actively shape urban politics in counterintuitive ways, Migrants and Machine Politics sheds new light on the political consequences of urbanization across India and the Global South.

This title was first published in 2003. Since independence in 1947, India has undergone a phase of rapid urbanization. New planning laws have been passed, new organizations established, public policy documents and discussion papers prepared and a host of land and housing schemes have been implemented. Still, however, the vast majority of urban expansion is an unplanned process that takes the form of squatting and illegal or semi-legal land subdivision. By looking in detail at two rapidly growing cities in Andhra Pradesh (Vijayawada and Viaskhapatnam) this book explores cultural, physical-spatial, political and economic determinants of the allocation of urban land and of urban growth in India in historical context. It focuses on the interplay between the government and the organizations in charge of their implementation, and the private sector on the other. Special attention is given to the conditions of the urban poor, with the changes in their socio-economic conditions.

Advances an alternative approach to democratic reform that focuses on building institutions that empower people who have little time for politics. How do we make democracy more equal? Although in theory, all citizens in a democracy have the right to participate in politics, time-consuming forms of participation often advantage some groups over others. Where some citizens may have time to wait in long lines to vote, to volunteer for a campaign, to attend community board meetings, or to stay up to date on national, state, and local news, other citizens struggle to do the same. Since not all people have the time or inclination to devote substantial energy to politics, certain forms of participation exacerbate existing inequalities. Democracy for Busy People takes up the very real challenge of how to build a democracy that empowers people with limited time for politics. While many plans for democratic renewal emphasize demanding forms of political participation and daunting ideals of democratic citizenship, political theorist Kevin J. Elliott proposes a fundamentally different approach. He focuses instead on making democratic citizenship undemanding so that even busy people can be politically included. This approach emphasizes the core institutions of electoral democracy, such as political parties, against deliberative reforms and sortition. Timely and action-focused, Democracy for Busy People is necessary reading.

This book examines the movement for living wages at the local level and what it tells us about urban politics. Oren M. Levin-Waldman studies the role that living wage campaigns may have had in recent years in altering the political landscape in four cities where they have been adopted: Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, and New Orleans. It is the author's belief that the living wage movements are a result of policy failure at the local level. They are the by-product of the failure to adequately address the changes that were occurring, mainly the changing urban economic base and growing income inequality. The author undertakes a scholarly analysis of the issue through the disciplinary lenses of political science while also employing some of the economists' tools.