Sociology

Taking stock of the urban transport scenario in Indian cities, this is the first full-length study of the metro rail system in India. In recent times the metro rail has come up as a favoured alternative of mass transport in urban spaces faced with growing population, heightened vehicular traffic, and increased pollution. Using data, analysis, and first-hand information, this book tells the story of metro rail as proposed and undertaken across India — from Kolkata in the east and Mumbai in the west to Delhi and Jaipur in the north and Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kochi in the south. Focusing on the complexities of project planning and contrasting the Indian experience with those of its global counterparts, this volume distils important lessons for future infrastructure projects. While the metro rail system has considerably improved inter-city connectivity, the metro story in India is an ongoing one.

This book presents an examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the United States. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is a detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975–78. Updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, this book deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.

Set against the backdrop of the capital’s history, culture, and socio-political scenario, this is a full-length study of the connection between rapid urbanization, rising crime, and law enforcement in Delhi. Providing an insider’s account of the evolution of policing in Delhi since the mid-19th century, the book closely looks at the patterns of policing in the ‘seven cities of Delhi’. From infrastructure constraints and related crime, crime against women and juveniles, terrorism to technology, the typology of criminals, and its trends in the process of the growth of the metropolis—the analyses demonstrates Delhi’s uniqueness as a metropolis and the attendant challenges. Aside from presenting different methods the Delhi police adopt to prevent crime, this book attempts to evaluate the successes and failures of these methods. While the rich historical records, statistical data, maps, and empirical surveys and observations brought together for the first time provide a wealth of additional information, the bibliography offers suggestions for the interested reader. Focusing on the challenges posed by over-urbanization and the changes in policing to counter them, the book draws out valuable lessons applicable in various degrees in other Indian cities.

American society has been long plagued by cycles of racial violence, most dramatically in the 1960s when hundreds of ghetto uprisings erupted across American cities. Though the larger, underlying causes of contentious race relations have remained the same, the lethality, intensity, and outcomes of these urban rebellions have varied widely. What accounts for these differences? And what lessons can be learned that might reduce the destructive effects of riots and move race relations forward? This detailed study is the first attempt to compare six major race riots that occurred in the three largest American urban areas during the course of the twentieth century: in Chicago in 1919 and 1968; in New York in 1935/1943 and 1964; and in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. The book weaves together detailed narratives of each riot, placing them in their changing historical contexts and showing how urban space, political regimes, and economic conditions—not simply an abstract “race conflict”—have structured the nature and extent of urban rebellions. The book draws upon archival research, primary sources, case studies, and personal observations to reconstruct events—especially for the 1964 Harlem-Bedford Stuyvesant uprising and Chicago's 1968 riots where no documented studies are available. By focusing on the similarities and differences in each city, identifying the unique and persisting issues, and evaluating the ways political leaders, law enforcement, and the local political culture have either defused or exacerbated urban violence, this book points the way toward alleviating long-standing ethnic and racial tensions.

This book is about Rampura, a multi-caste village in princely Mysore (now part of Karnataka) as it was in 1948, the year when M. N. Srinivas did fieldwork there. As so often in human affairs, and in scholarly and scientific history, an accident opens the path to a solution; in this case, a fire that destroyed the author's notes led him to write this book. Professor Srinivas's monograph, based on the human mind's extraordinary capacity to bring forth significant details of the past, is a major ethnographic portrait woven from a sea of original data and purposeful seeking after a description of a village in its own terms. The book’s success suggests people should not let accidents and failures destroy one's art. The importance of the its study could not be overstated as caste represented a unique form of social stratification, and millions of human beings had ordered their lives according to it for over two millennia. The book describes Rampura's village life, agriculture, the sexes, relation between castes, classes and factions, and the quality of social relations.