Cauca, located in southwestern Colombia and home to the largest indigenous population in the country, is renowned as a site of indigenous mobilization. In 1994, following a destructive earthquake, many families in Cauca were forced to leave their communities of origin and relocate to other areas within the province where the state provided them with land and housing. Noting that disasters offer communities the opportunity to remake themselves and their priorities, David D. Gow examines how...

Why are Mexicans so successful in individual sports, but deficient in team play? Why do Mexicans dislike living in skyscrapers? Why do Mexicans love to see themselves as victims, but also love victims? And why, though the Mexican people traditionally avoid conflict, is there so much violence in a country where many leaders have died by assassination?In this shrewd and fascinating book, the renowned scholar and former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda sheds much light on the puzzling...

You’re no idiot, of course. You know there are more people from Latin America living in the United States than ever before. And you’re aware that Latinos come from several countries, including Cuba, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.But you don’t have to south of the border to explore the rich Latino heritage. The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Latino History and Culture offers an exhaustive exploration of all things Hispanic. In this Complete Idiot’s Guide®, you get...

Planning Sustainable Cities: An infrastructure-based approach provides an analytical framework for urban sustainability, focusing on the services and performance of infrastructure systems.The book approaches infrastructure as a series of systems that function in synergy and are directly linked with urban planning. This method streamlines and guides the planning process, while still highlighting detail, each infrastructure system is decoded in four "system levels". The leve...

Sharing a postrevolutionary sympathy with the struggles of the poor, the contributors to this first comprehensive collection of writing on subalternity in Latin America work to actively link politics, culture, and literature. Emerging from a decade of work and debates generated by a collective known as the Latin American Studies Group, the volume privileges the category of the subaltern over that of class, as contributors focus on the possibilities of investigating history from below.

Despite the combined efforts of British planners, politicians, the public and interest groups, the ‘Solent City’ stands as one of a number of instances of a peculiar instance of urban sprawl – muted, and slow to emerge – yet produced paradoxically by very strong interests in promoting conservation and restraint.This unique and valuable case study, while focusing on the planning and development of South Hampshire in particular, enables an in-depth study of the issues surrounding pla...

A world more urban...The world is undergoing massive urbanization, and is projected to increase from three to over four billion city dwellers, mostly in the developing world, within 15 years. This historic shift is producing dramatic effects on human well-being and the environment....but less poorUnplanned shanty-towns without basic services are not an inevitable consequence of urbanization and slums are not explained by poverty alone. Urban misery also stems from mis...

This book examines wayfinding from a broad public health perspective and articulates what needs to be done to create better wayfinding for all people regardless of age, ability, or mode of transportation. Addressing both science and the human experience, the book brings together a group of international experts to examine community wayfinding from a variety of viewpoints.It first presents a critical foundation for understanding wayfinding from an individual perspective. Next, it de...

Despite a shared colonial past, South American nations experienced different patterns of conflict in the nineteenth century. These differences led to the creation of a variety of states and regimes, from authoritarian military oligarchies to popular democracies. Using a rigorous logic of comparison, Fernando López-Alves explores the roots of state building in five countries and explains why the political systems of these early postindependent societies were prone to militarism, corporatism...

In this book, the author develops a relational concept of space that encompasses social structure, the material world of objects and bodies, and the symbolic dimension of the social world. Löw’s guiding principle is the assumption that space emerges in the interplay between objects, structures and actions. Based on a critical discussion of classic theories of space, Löw develops a new dynamic theory of space that accounts for the relational context in which space is constituted. This innov...

Access to water and sanitation service in industrialized countries is nearly taken for granted, but in many developing countries less than half of the population has access to such services. Decades of effort on a global scale have been invested to solve this problem. One such effort—Brazil’s participatory approach to water and sanitation—is Nance’s subject in Engineers and Communities. In the early 1980s, Brazilian engineers created participatory sanitation (known locally as condominial s...

As the event management field expands, there has been an emergence of a distinctive ‘events’ policy field of study and a need for more advanced texts that look at this subject with a multidisciplinary research and theoretical orientation.Events Policy: From Theory to Strategy is the first text to embrace this new direction in the field of events management. Its main aim is to locate the phenomena of events (and festivity) within a theoretical and strategic framework and, i...