Gendering the city: the lived experience of transforming cities,urban cultures and spaces of belonging

Debates centred on ‘planetary urbanisation’ have raised questions over the adequacy of existing theories and epistemologies to explain the quantitative and qualitative transformations of cities. However, this theorization of the urban has met with opposition from post-colonial and feminist researchers amongst others. The comparative, empirical research in this collection, from Bolivia, India and Turkey, highlights that the city remains an important analytical and concrete framework, demarcated by contingency and cultural change through which residents must navigate. In particular we focus on the specificity of women’s lives and their capacity to problematise universalist theory, documenting their interrogation of simplistic binaries such as modern/traditional; their innovative approaches to informal settlement, housing and markets; their production of urban knowledge in order to negotiate the city; and processes and practices of mobility, experimentation, risk taking and aspiration that contest or support a myriad of urban imaginaries. Whilst not rejecting the need for theories that allow comparative perspectives on cities, our conclusions underscore the importance of recognising the multiple logics that generate city space and urban cultures, and the consequent need to parochialise the empirical basis of theories that claim to be global in outreach.     

Manufacturing Disorder: Liberalization,Informal Enterprise and Economic ‘Ungovernance’ in African Small Firm Clusters

Small enterprise clusters are viewed as an important means of promoting competitive small‐firm development even in contexts of unstable markets and weak states. Yet the emergence of successful enterprise clusters in developing regions of Southern Europe, Asia and Latin America contrasts with their conspicuous absence in Africa. This article challenges ahistorical and culturalist explanations regarding the lack of successful enterprise clusters in Africa through a comparative analysis of three dynamic and increasingly globalized informal manufacturing clusters in two different regions of Nigeria. Focusing on a Muslim Yoruba weaving cluster in the town of Ilorin in south‐western Nigeria, and two Christian Igbo shoe and garment clusters in the town of Aba in south‐eastern Nigeria, this article explores the role of culture, religion and the state in shaping informal economic governance in an African context. An account of the varied and complex history of these Nigerian enterprise networks reveals both their capacity for institutional innovation and economic linkages across ethnic, religious and gender boundaries, as well as their vulnerability to fragmentation and involution in the context of liberalization, state neglect and political opportunism. Far from demonstrating the inadequacies of African cultural institutions, the slide of African entrepreneurial networks into social disorder and economic ‘ungovernance’¹ is traced to the destructive impact of neoliberal reforms in a context of poverty and formal institutional exclusion.     

Tertiary gymnosperms from Tasmania: Araucariaceae

Three new species of the Araucariaceae are described from leaf remains, Araucaria readiae from the Early Eocene Regatta Point flora, A. hastiensis from the Middle-Late Eocene Hasties flora, and Agathis tasmanica from the Early Oligocene-Early Miocene Little Rapid River flora. Additionally, emended diagnoses are presented for Araucarioides linearis and A. annulata. A. readiae is the first organically preserved species in the section Eutacta described from Tasmania, A. hastiensis is the first record of a species not in section Eutacta in Tasmania, and A. tasmanica is the first record of Agathis in Tasmania. These species, along with other records from south-eastern Australia indicate the presence of a high diversity of araucarian species in the region in the Early-Middle Tertiary, although no species survive there today. Climatic change and competition from angiosperms may have led to their demise in that region.     

Neighborhoods and Fertility in Accra, Ghana: An AMOEBA-based Approach

Fertility levels remain high in most of sub-Saharan Africa, despite recent declines, and even in a large capital city such as Accra, Ghana, women are having children at a pace that is well above replacement level and this will contribute to significant levels of future population growth in the city. Our purpose in this paper is to evaluate the way in which neighborhood context may shape reproductive behavior in Accra. In the process, we introduce several important innovations to the understanding of intra-urban fertility levels in a sub-Saharan African city: (1) despite the near explosion of work on neighborhoods as a spatial unit of analysis, very little of this research has been conducted outside of the richer countries; (2) we characterize neighborhoods on the basis of local knowledge of what we call "vernacular neighborhoods"; (3) we then define what we call "organic neighborhoods" using a new clustering tool-the AMOEBA algorithm-to create these neighborhoods; and then (4) we evaluate and explain which of the neighborhood concepts has the largest measurable contextual effect on an individual woman's reproductive behavior. Multi-level regression analysis suggests that vernacular neighborhoods are more influential on a woman's decision to delay marriage, whereas the organic neighborhoods based on socioeconomic status better capture the factors that shape fertility decisions after marriage.