The great American home robbery

The practice of targeting of racial minorities for predatory home loans forms part of a long and under-reported history of discrimination in the USA

Laura Gottesdiener

Brazilians rediscover politics

Until June 2013, time seemed to be frozen in Brazil and the future, a mere copy of the unequal present. Transport price hikes changed that

Luiz Eduardo Soares

Shuffle & Repeat

Cairo protestors are hearing familiar grievances in old protest songs. Things endlessly repeat themselves, just differently

Neo Muyanga

Lessons for America

What can Hartford , once America’s most prosperous city, learn from scholarship on cities in the global south?

Garth Myers

Learning to be fearless

Urban studies involves the continuous search for the intersecting points between diagnosis, analysis, critique and proposition

Edgar Pieterse

An Island of Exception

A thriving commercial centre in south Delhi, Hauz Khas Village is notorious for its unscrupulous landlords who have transformed this neighbourhood, officially dismissed as a rural enclave, into a destination for pleasure-seekers

Samanth Subramanian

Canny & Co.

Founded by Cameroonian entrepreneur Bonaventure Ndikung, SAVVY Contemporary is a Berlin exhibition space devoted to art, networking and eating

Sean O’Toole

On the threshold

In 2007 architect, designer and artist Danilo Capasso started photographing the Italian port city of Naples, in particular its eastern edge. The district, home to licit and illegal economies, is marked by an unplanned sense of place

Iain Chambers | Danilo Carpese

Lessons from somewhere

Renowned academic Ananya Roy’s talks to Gautam Bhan about fashioning an urban theory that is cognisant of the role of place

Ananya Roy & Gautam Bhan

Credibility is everything

Togolese-Canadian novelist Edem Awumey talks about the many literatures that inform his exile-influenced writings

Sean O'Toole

The Baritone

Franco, the godfather of Congolese Rumba, wrote the soundtrack to Africa’s early post-independence years. He skilfully negotiated change and tyranny in Zaire with guitar and song

Fred de Vries

Soweto: After Informality

Once a byword for deprivation, Soweto is changing, finds. Rapidly. Roads have been tarred, electricity introduced, water pipes laid, public transport upgraded. Writer Joonji Mdyogolo meets the decision-makers who are shaping contemporary Soweto

Joonji Mdyogolo

Cliches in the city

On films that confirm and challenge stereotypes about African cities

Tau Tavengwa

Little Lagos in China

Yepoka Yeebo on the West African traders who have settled in Guangzhou since the late 1990s. She discovers that for those who stayed, daily life is not just about money. Food and religion matter too

Yepoka Yeebo

People of the sky

In 2004 Guy Tillim moved into an apartment in central Johannesburg. Over the next five months he set about recording life in the city’s cramped high-rise apartments

Sean O'Toole