Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
Robert Neuwirth · Economics & Agriculture
Price: Rs. 135. "Perhaps the first writer actually to have lived in the shantytowns of four continents, Robert Neuwirth brilliantly portrays the indomitable energy, dark humor, and gritty determination that sustain the cities of the poor Squatters, as he shows in this remarkable book, are the true builders of our global urban future." MIKE DAVIS , author of Dead Cities and Planet of the Slums "Robert Neuwirth's teeming narrative of squatters and their struggles on four continents brings the reader face-to-face with lived experience. Amidst the color, the violence, the creation of living space from the slenderest of means, the vibrancy of the informal sector, and the battle for autonomy and property he vividly recreates, he reminds us that squatters are, like the poor, 'always with us. They have made and continue to make cities, and to improve them if given haif a chance by the authorities and the legal system. If you want to understand the 'lived city of squatters, Neuwirth offers the sights, the smells, and the voices of cinéma vérité." JAMES C. SCOTT , Stering Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University, and author of Domination and the Arts of Resistance and Weapons of the Wear "In this moving, lively, often comic, sometimes tragic account of the 'largest builders of housing in the world', Robert Neuwirth deciphers the complexities of disadvantage. The experience of these squatters allows him to see afresh what we have come to take for granted, whether it is private property of the right of some to prevent others from living." SASKIA SASSEN , Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, and author of the Global City