This book argues for the value of urban villages as places. To reveal their qualities, a series of drawings and photographs uncovers the immerse concentration of social life in their dense structures and provides a peek into residents homes and daily lives.

In cities throughout the world, there is an increasingly ubiquitous presence of distinct social and spatial areas - urban villages, cultural and ethnic quarters. These spaces are sites where capital and culture intertwine in new ways. City of Quarters brings together some of the most prominent authors writing about urban villages to provide the first systematic and multi-disciplinary overview of this high-profile urban phenomenon. They address key questions such as 'What is the role of urban villages and quarters in the contemporary city?' and 'What are the economic, political, socio-spatial and cultural practices and processes that surround these urban spaces?' Blending conceptual chapters with theoretically directed case studies from all over the world, this book includes issues such as local and regional development strategies, production, consumption, the creative industries, popular culture, identity, lifestyle, and tourism.

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a ‘Neolithic’ way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle-range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. While there have been a number of studies that address coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out "on the ground" in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt in order to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies which span four continents and more than 10,000 years of human history.

"Youngtown, Arizona, opened in 1954 and was the first development community to have a minimum age requirement (then 65) and to ban underage children as permanent residents. The developer Del Webb unveiled Sun City six years later. Adjacent to Yountown, it offered modest homes abutting a golf course. In the ensuing decades, active adult communities have proliferated, including Harold Schwartz's The Villages in central Florida, today [America's] largest retirement community. For nearly sixty years, the success of these and similar communities has changed the image of retirees from frail, impoverished old people to energetic, well-off adults enjoying a resort-like lifestyle. While some experts predicted these communities would fail or undermine the obligations between generations, they are now firmly embedded as one possible extension of the American Dream. Judith Ann Trolander's study of the "active adult" lifestyle focuses specifically on how the development of age-restricted communities has redefined the sense of self-identity among the elderly; changed the popular image of retirees; called attention to attitudes of the elderly toward children; popularized golf-course, gated, and amenity-rich developments; and made this new, age-restricted lifestyle affordable or accessible to large numbers of retirees - some of whom may actually continue working. Examining the origins, development, failures, and challenges facing these communities as the baby boomer population continues to age, Trolander offers a truly original defense of a sometimes controversial aspect of American life."--Book cover.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Sustainable Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research" that was published in Sustainability