Overlooked Cities

Hanna A. Ruszczyk is an urban geographer in the Department of Geography, Durham University. She is interested in the everyday lived experience of the world’s invisible majority in academically overlooked smaller cities. She utilises a feminist and postcolonial lens to consider how gendered aspects of cities intersect with risk and resilience. Erwin Nugraha is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Twente and a senior research fellow at the Resilience Development Initiative. His research focuses on climate adaptation, cultures of risk and resilience, and urban decoloniality. He was one of the recipients of the Allianz Climate Risk Research Award in 2017. Isolde de Villiers is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Free State Centre for Human Rights. She works mainly with questions of spatial (in)justice and the role of law in time and space. She looks at law and cities from a critical and feminist perspective.

Introduction Part 1: Politics and Power in Overlooked Cities 1. Sanxian: Re-/un-thinking Chinese urban hierarchy with a medium-sized city 2. The changing logic of urban planning in Nepal: From informal to incremental 3. The marginalised centre: overlooked cities in South Africa’s interior 4. Debt and developmental impasse in the secondary city: Geographies of municipal finance in Zarqa, Jordan Part 2: Production and Negotiation of Knowledge in Overlooked Cities 5. Intermediate cities as urban innovators: An analysis of disaster risk management in Santa Fe, Argentina, and Manizales, Colombia 6. Comparing secondary cities: Holistic evaluation of urban development in Arequipa and Trujillo, Peru 7. Post-conflict Dili: An overlooked urbanscape reaching out for development 8. Middle cities: The politics of intermediary of Bandar Lampung, Semarang, and Bontang city in Indonesia under climate crisis Conclusion