The United Nations (UN) mandate of achieving healthful living for all by the year 2015 through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is facing several challenges. In the school environment, and particularly in less developed countries (LDCs), the situation is further strained by both relatively weak infrastructure and competing governmental…

The struggle against violent extremism is the most significant national-security challenge of the 21st century. It is the challenge that makes all the threats Americans face that much more dangerous. The ungoverned spaces, urban slums, and impoverished regions of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, along with the poorly integrated immigrant…

An innovative learning technique that originated in a slum in India's capital, New Delhi, sets the stage for "Q&A" that is now the Oscar winning movie, "Slumdog Millionaire". In an interview, Dr. Sugata Mitra, the creator of this new educational pedagogy termed Minimally Invasive Education (MIE), explains how it can help…

The current interest in multimodal rhetoric was anticipated by Jacob Riis's social documentary texts and presentations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast with the socialist urban critiques presented by Friedrich Engels, Riis's work demonstrated profound ambivalence toward the city's poor. While calling for reform…

A private alternative school in the slums of New Delhi (India) is committed to ending female child labor and ensuring that its students don't grow up poor. The school was able to enroll girls in its all-female afternoon classes by getting their mothers involved in income-generating cooperatives. The students often outperform their peers in state…

This paper considers the implications of current notions of the learning city. It argues that popular neoliberal ideologies create an environment in which lifelong learners strive for the learning city as an end product, both in production and for consumption, rather than embrace it as a living, social context. The rhetoric of the knowledge…

A passionate and persistent advocate for American inner-city children, Jonathan Kozol has spent most of his adult life teaching, speaking, and writing about the conditions and problems of urban youth. In this interview, Kozol discusses his commitment to children who live in the poorest inner-city neighborhoods. (Author/AEF)

The Society for Promotion of Adult Resource Centres was created to alleviate the problem of railway settlement families and pavement dwellers in Bombay, India. The area resource center provides information, analysis of available resources, discussion of problems, and sharing of experiences. (JOW)

Critiques Nicholas Lemann's recent book on the 1940-70 Black migration from the South to the urban North, particularly the thesis that the modern-day Black urban underclass is composed mainly of ex-sharecroppers and their descendants. Traces the theory's political history and discusses evidence that many Black migrants achieved relative success.…

Kingston, capital of Jamaica, has been molded by three institutions: colonialism, the sugar plantation, and slavery. It has an enormous marginal population living in permanent poverty and not absorbable into the labor force. This marginality, fundamentally related to dependent capitalism, sustains itself by keeping wages low. (CS)

A geographic perspective of urban revitalization is provided in this publication, which is intended for geography professors, students, and researchers. There are seven chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the geographical aspects of urban revitalization. Urban decline and redevelopment is the focus of the second chapter. Discussed are parks, civic…

Social, economic, and cultural factors that historically have limited the housing choices of southern and eastern European immigrants to the United States and have influenced the development of ethnic neighborhoods in American cities are reviewed in this paper. Difficulties that non English speaking, relatively uneducated immigrants had in…

The economic and physical decline of urban neighborhoods has become a widespread and widely misunderstood phenomenon in post-war America. It has not been restricted to aging central cities: most growing cities and many suburbs possess areas of decay as well. After decades of changing occupancy, dwellings have fallen into disrepair, and the quality…