Charles Mkula – Urban Disasters: A Challenge To Planning In Malawi

Photo: malawidemocrat.com

Urbanisation has outstripped government’s capacity to provide services and guide urban growth in Malawi, a physical planning expert, Mphatso Kadaluka has said.
“Inadequate and deteriorating infrastructure has exposed urban inhabitants to myriad types of disasters that leaves them vulnerable to inexplicable impacts,” said Kadaluka, a northern region Acting Commissioner for Physical Planning in the Ministry of Lands and Housing.

Kadaluka said Malawi has been ill prepared for fires and other forms of disasters such as collapsing buildings, roads and bridges.
“The only disasters we seem to care most about are floods, drought and earth tremors and quakes,” noted the planning official.  He bemoaned the lack of a proactive stance to mitigate urban disasters which catch authorities and professionals off guard when they occur.
“Urban areas in Malawi are not spared of these natural and human made disasters,” he warned.
Kadaluka said the most common urban disasters were fire outbreaks resulting from faulty electrical installations, illegal storage and sale of liquid fuel. He pointed to the fires at the Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) offices, farmers organisation warehouse, Blantyre Flea market, Bakers Pride, Ori cooking oil refinery, Keza building, Ekwendeni market, and the most recent at Mzuzu city main market in April.
“These fires led to disastrous consequences such as loss of goods and services, property, and people’s livelihood,” said Kadaluka.

Read more: http://www.urbanafrica.net/challenge-planning-malawi/

“Urbanized” – Full Length Documentary Movie (New Urbanism)

Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.
Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it?
By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized frames a global discussion on the future of cities.

Steph – Housing for the Homeless: 14 Smart & Sensitive Solutions

Photo: treehugger

weburbanist.com. December 2014. City officials spend a lot of time and energy worrying about how to keep homeless people off public furniture and out of certain common areas, when they should be considering how to better manage the issue of homelessness in general. One area of focus is homeless housing, whether simply meeting the immediate needs of people who live on the streets or providing a more long-term, forward-thinking transitional living spaces. These 14 designs for homeless housing provoke thought as to how we can meet the needs of disadvantaged people living in our own communities, and ensure that the situation is only temporary.

Read more: http://weburbanist.com/smart-sensitive-solutions/

David Thorpe – Upgrade Slums In 230 Cities For Just $14.5 million? Impossible! – But They Did It.

sustainablecitiescollective. July 2014. Millions of people live in slums in Asian cities. The Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) has been running a program to try to upgrade living conditions for these people that has proved itself to be massively effective and at little cost. How has it done this?
Its Asian Coalition for Community Action Program (ACCA) has been running for five years in 230 cities in 19 countries and it is now possible to see its achievements. It works at the grassroots; the people living in the slums are the ones who plan and implement the projects, tackling problems of land, infrastructure and housing at scale, working in partnership with the local governments and other stakeholders.

It is amazing what they have achieved with the small budget that they have been given. The total budget over the five years was just $14.5 million but with this they have:
completed 150 big housing projects (for just up to $40,000 each)
set up 98 city-based community development funds
got 400,000 community savers to invest $30 million in them
completed 1635 small upgrading projects (for about $3000 each)
conducted citywide surveys in about 200 cities
creative collaborative partnerships with local governments in 190 cities
conducted 35 community-led disaster rehabilitation projects in 11 countries.

Read more: http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/david-thorpe

Laura Vaughan – Urban Renewal Needs More Than ‘Garden City’ Stamp To Take Root

newgeography.com. July, 2014. Every few years the ideals of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city utopia are resurrected in an attempt by the UK government to create new communities, and address the country’s housing crisis. Sometimes this takes the form of new towns or eco-towns, and sometimes proposals for an actual garden city are put forward – as in the last budget.
Rather than just rolling out this romantic terminology, we should take a closer look at garden city ideals and how they can be adopted to make the proposed Ebbsfleet development a success.
Several years ago my colleague Michael Edwards presciently forecast the current problems in the Thames Gateway where Ebbsfleet falls, with a dominance of private development that does little to provide for local employment and walkable communities.
He outlined the need to return to funding principles similar to the garden city model, where development trusts retain freeholds on the land. This model, based on investment in infrastructure and services, is a fundamental principle that shifts from short-term returns to a long-term relationship created between the collective or public landowner and local inhabitants.

Lessons From History
Despite the fact that the garden city was a highly influential model throughout the first half of the 20th century, ultimately leading to the establishment of some key settlements in the UK, US and elsewhere in the world, it has had few genuine successes. After World War II, similar utopian dreams of creating model communities, with decent housing surrounding a well-designed centre, met with the reality. British reformer William Beveridge famously summed them up for having “no gardens, few roads, no shops and a sea of mud”.

Read more: http://www.newgeography.com/content/004396-urban-renewal-needs-more-garden-city-stamp-take-root

The Why, The What, And The How Of Asian Studies

• by: Peter Herrmann & Deirdre Hunt

The articles in this section aim to promote the knowledge gathered in Asia Studies, as well as the relations between Asia and other regions of the world, and give impulses in order to advance research in this field. This also means pushing boundaries forward and push them beyond the often prejudiced views from within and without.

The Why, The What, And The How Of Asian Studies
Abstract
Management education frequently presents on a quasi-technical dimension. This is a matter of dealing with things but also the definition of what is relevant: for many in the field, only what can be technically managed is defined as relevant for business. Such strategy starts from presumptions that lack basic sociological knowledge. Even Max Weber, who centred a large part of his scientific work on showing the development of the iron cage of a bureaucratic system, underlined that such a system can actually only work if, at certain points, the basic rules are disregarded.

In the present contribution, the authors go beyond such a stance and claim that successful and sustainable strategies of management do not depend on occasional disrespect of the rules but on actively widening the framework to which those strategies refer. Centrally, it means that defining the focus of any management theory and management strategy culture has to play a central role. This is achieved not just by providing an adjunct position to culture but by highlighting its role as a central element discursively informing management issues in theory and practice.
Methodologically, this is guided by the concept of Sustainable Social Quality, which suggests a holistic approach by seeing the social as emerging from people productively developing the tension between processes and structures.
This approach will be empirically taken in this paper by looking at experiences in the field of teaching Chinese business. Read more