odization of the racial project in the Obama era. Given the volume’s focus on the United States, it is striking that so little attention (with the exception of Singh’s essay) is given to the mass incarceration and policing of the last thirty years; here surely is one of those elusive social processes by which race is forged and institutionalized. Undergirding the most trenchant chapters, however, is a common grounding in the transnational racial project of a declining U.S. hegemon. Whether this remakes the liberal imperial project or marks the failure of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative project remains very much an open question here. These ambiguities are revealed in Omi and Winant’s concluding chapter, where readers remain curiously tethered to a consideration—and in many ways, a defense— of the gains of the 1960s and 1970s social movements. This is at times difficult to grasp given the fierce abandonment by the left and right, Democrats and Republicans alike, of the postwar liberal and social democratic racial project. Still, as the authors in this collection repeatedly emphasize, uncertainty and fluidity in racial conceptions, identities, and movements for justice mark the present and near future—and this is a remarkable advance from the scholarship of a generation ago. Confronting the inability of past structural formations and discourses to explicate racial meanings and hierarchies as they are being remade by today’s movements, migrations, and states is still a bracing tonic. Even more problematic, and yet to be unearthed here, is the ongoing impact of the replacement of the Third World/U.S. racial binaries of the mid-twentieth century by the rise of Asian/ Global South relations in the decades to come. These observations only serve to underline the importance and value of this anthology to students and scholars of race in the twentyfirst century. Written in accessible language for undergraduate as well as graduate classes on race, ethnicity, and stratification, it marks the summation of almost a generation of engaged work undertaken during the collapse of liberal hopes and dreams for racial reconciliation. Living as we do in an unstable interregnum as a new, global racial regime is being forged, this collection and the questions its authors grapple with are all the more pressing.

Democracy and the Left: Social Policy and Inequality in Latin America:

Improving the health and welfare of people who live in slums.

‘Categorically based expectations regarding sexual object choice’, according to Bertelson (p. 133), ‘make no provision for the complexity of sexual and emotional feelings and responses in the personal lives of actual men and women’. Bertelson proceeds to skillfully tease out the social processes whereby the individual’s object of desire is relatively defined-masculine desire for a female figure, feminine desire for a male figure. He shows that both forms of desire are laminated together in any individual so that neither (heterosexual desire nor homosexual desire) can ever be more than a preference. A problem occurs when Bertelson attempts to iisc his literary examples in order to ‘explain’ the changes in sexual definitions and expectations from era to era: he suggests that sexual literature is a vehicle for cultural mythology, allowing sex roles to resemble whatever a particular society at a particular moment in history wants them to resemble-more of a truism than an explanation. Indeed, Bertelson’s often excellent book is sometimes made frustrating due to his occasionally weak analytic work: to spend much of one section labouring the rather obvious point that deviation from the norms of heterosexuality threatens the conventional view of sex as ‘natural’ does not facilitate his real argument. Awareness must increasingly come down to particulars, and, furthermore, to complexities and ambivalences. The very fact that sex roles may be examined as roles admits the possibility that they are, to some degree, arbitrary. One may then go on to question the benefits of the role and the price that must be paid for them. It is this position that Bertelson’s early discussions lead one to, yet he leaves himself with a formidable task for a conclusion, prescribing A world of snowflakes.. . very different from our present world of snowdrifts. I t would be a place where familiar distinctions of sex and sexuality would have little if any cultural significance-a world indeed of individuals, but not of isolated and wholly self-centred individuals. [P. 253.1

Capitalism and Social Democracy

Approximately 1 billion people currently live in informal settlements, primarily in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries. Informal settlements are defined by poor-quality houses or shacks built outside formal laws and regulations. Most informal settlements lack piped water or adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, and public services. Many are on dangerous sites because their inhabitants have a higher chance of avoiding eviction. This paper considers how to build resilience to the impacts of climate change in informal settlements. It focuses on informal settlements in cities in low- and middle-income countries and how these concentrate at-risk populations. This paper also reviews what is being done to address climate resilience in informal settlements. In particular, community- and city-government-led measures to upgrade settlements can enhance resilience to climate-change risks and serve vulnerable groups. It also discusses how the barriers to greater scale and effectiveness can be overcome, including with synergies with the Sustainable Development Goals.

Building Resilience to Climate Change in Informal Settlements

A multilevel analysis of association between neighborhood social capital and depression: Evidence from the first South African National Income Dynamics Study

This paper considers why the housing subsidy programme in South Africa has had so little impact on poverty reduction despite its scale and generous funding. It discusses how this was linked to the government’s conception of housing, the institutions involved and who controlled funding flows for housing. Most government funding went to contractors to build new units “for the poor”; it was assumed that these would replace homes in informal settlements that the poor developed themselves. Despite statements about the government’s commitment to the People’s Housing Process (PHP), informal settlements were only seen in negative terms and there was no support for incremental upgrading and very little support for low-income households to build their own homes. Meanwhile, the contractor-built houses were usually too small, of poor quality and in locations far from livelihoods and services. The paper ends with suggestions for how the formal institutions of government can learn to support and work with the poor. The...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956247810392272

Housing, institutions, money: the failures and promise of human settlements policy and practice in South Africa

This article examines ways in which transnational grassroots networks produce knowledge and learning that crosses borders to help cities explore solutions to dilemmas of urban development. International development programmes often legitimise a narrow class of professionals, advising donor agencies and foundations, private investment institutions, governments and other providers of capital for developmental intervention through a predominantly vertical hierarchy. Shack/Slum Dwellers International, a network of urban poor federations across Africa, Asia and Latin America, has over two decades of experience sharing knowledge through a methodology that has promised to upend these relatively vertical relationships. This network represents a growing critical mass of local national and transnational organisations of the poor learning from each other. This article argues that Shack/Slum Dwellers International’s exchange methodology, built on collective learning and discovery between communities and formal govern...

City learning from below: urban poor federations and knowledge generation through transnational, horizontal exchange

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The Long March: Deep Democracy in Cross-National Perspective

Transitions to democracy promise equal political power. But political ruptures carry no guarantee that democracy can overcome the accumulated inequalities of history. In South Africa, the transitio...

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Weapons of the Strong: Elite Resistance and the Neo-Apartheid City

Why do some urban governing regimes realize a more equal distribution of public goods than others? Local government interventions in Sao Paulo, Brazil, have produced surprisingly effective redistribution of residential public goods — housing and sanitation — between 1989 and 2016. I use original interviews and archival research for a comparative-historical analysis of variation across time in Sao Paulo’s governance of housing and sanitation. I argue that sequential configurations of a) “embeddedness” of the local state in civil society and b) the “cohesion” of the institutional sphere of the local state, explain why and when urban governing regimes generate the coordinating capacity to distribute public goods on a programmatic basis. I further illustrate how these configurations can explain variation in urban governing regimes across the world.

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Benjamin H. Bradlow

Papers

Housing, institutions, money: the failures and promise of human settlements policy and practice in South Africa

City learning from below: urban poor federations and knowledge generation through transnational, horizontal exchange

The Long March: Deep Democracy in Cross-National Perspective

Weapons of the Strong: Elite Resistance and the Neo-Apartheid City

Embeddedness and cohesion: regimes of urban public goods distribution