People and state in socialist Cuba : ideas and practices of revolution

This book is a political and anthropological analysis of the concept of Revolution as it is understood and experienced by Cubans in their daily lives. Urban agricultural movements, alternative medicine, self-employment, and migration reveal complex interactions and disrupt assumptions that the Cuban sate is a static, anachronistic regime.

Developing an approach to assess the influence of integrating disaster risk reduction practices into infrastructure reconstruction on socio-economic development

Purpose: Disasters provide physical, social, economic, political and environmental development windows of opportunity particularly through housing and infrastructure reconstruction. The reconstruction process should not be neglected due to the opportunistic nature of facilitating innovation in development. In this respect, post-disaster "infrastructure" reconstruction plays a critical role in development discourse and is often essential to sustain recovery after major disasters. However, reconstruction following a natural disaster is a complicated problem involving social, economic, cultural, environmental, psychological, and technological aspects. There are significant development benefits of well-developed "Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Strategies" and, for many reasons, the concept of DRR can be more easily promoted following a disaster. In this respect, a research study was conducted to investigate the effects of integrating DRR strategies into infrastructure reconstruction on enhancing the socio-economic development process from a qualitative stance. The purpose of this paper is to document part of this research study; it proposes an approach that can be used to assess the influence of the application of the DRR concept into infrastructure reconstruction on socio-economic development. Design/methodology/approach: The research methodology included a critical literature review. Findings: This paper suggests that the best way to assess the influence of integrating DRR strategies practices into infrastructure reconstruction on socio-economic development is to assess the level of impact that DRR strategies has on overcoming various factors that form vulnerabilities. Having assessed this, the next step is to assess the influence of overcoming the factors that form vulnerabilities on achieving performance targets of socio-economic development. Originality/value: This paper primarily presents a framework for the concept of socio-economic development and a modelled classification of DRR practices.

The ‘camps system’ in Italy : corruption, inefficiencies and practices of resistance

The alarming proliferation of ‘campi nomadi’ (nomad camps) in Italy intensifies the urgency of analysing their internal mechanism and the complex relation between all the parties [1]; ‘camp dwellers’, government agencies and Civil Society organisations [CSOs][2], involved in their production and reification. To arrive at an adequate appreciation of this nexus, the three components of what has been termed the ‘camps system’ have been analysed separately. This approach helped to pinpoint how they have combined to produce a hegemonic perspective on Romani issues, which yields a simplistic binary interpretation of a complex and dynamic phenomenon: Romanies are generally viewed as either victims or threats, narrowing the range of responses to charity or hostility. Only in recent years a growing awareness regarding the agency of camp inhabitants has re-emerged more consistently after a period in which an ‘encamped life’ was at times associated to Agamben’s (1998) ‘bare life’ and Foucault’s (1977) ‘biopolitics’. Nevertheless, scholars are still hesitant in developing a current of study looking specifically at camps, not only as ‘resistance sites’, but more broadly as ‘all-inclusive systems’, where interacting and interdependent agents form an integrated whole. Through in-depth analysis of this specific socio-political context I was able to observe the existence of a democratic deficit in the way these actors operate and co-operate with each other: competition and antagonisms, corruption, lack of transparency and accountability, and inefficiencies have all contributed over the years to producing and maintaining the present living situation of the Romani peoples.

Place-making or place-masking? The everyday political economy of “making place”

As redevelopment and gentrification strategies globally continue to be aimed at attracting wealthier residents and consumers in an effort to drive economic growth, concerns for and interventions in the interests of social equity appear decreasingly relevant. Government, private sector and community organisations have of course worked together in different times and places to implement programs that are more rather than less inclusive – the variations always depending on the spatial politics of the context. This paper examines contemporary discourses and practices of place-making in Melbourne, and asks whether ways of thinking about urban redevelopment as place-making in this time and place are likely to enable the inclusion of social equity in these urban “improvements”.