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The documents in this section explore production and commerce: the effects of monetary affluence, the guilds and markets, government interventions to stimulate production, to regulate exchange, and to control the city's population. Population growth was so strong that before 1300 several cities had to limit immigration from the countryside. Alongside production there developed the techniques and skills of international trade and finance, particularly in Tuscany, and where these were combined with production, there was strong economic growth and enrichment. In Italy 'between 1050 and 1300, population, wealth and resources concentrated in cities and commercial activity to a degree without precedent in the ancient or medieval world'.
Home economics offers an innovative, comparative history of domestic service in southern Africa’s post-colonial cities. Focusing on Lusaka and drawing wider comparisons, it provides the first in-depth study of domestic service in Black households in the region. Drawing on rich oral histories and diverse documentary sources, it develops a new theoretical approach which, for the first time, brings wage and kin-based domestic labour and child and adult workers into a single frame of analysis. In so doing, it challenges the narrow focus of existing scholarship and policymaking and breaks new ground in the theorisation of work. The book traces how Black employers and workers adapted existing models of domestic service rooted in colonial labour relations and African kinship structures, revealing how waged domestic service was gradually undermined by increased reliance on extended family networks and the labour of young female kin. It demonstrates how women and girls pursued employment in and came to dominate both kin-based and waged domestic service. It also explores efforts to regulate and organise these largely informal and intimate forms of work, and the gendered and generational impacts of such interventions. This rich and timely study provides essential insights into the nature of gender, work, and urban economies across southern Africa. It reveals the strategies that children, women, and men have pursued to support themselves and their dependants in the face of economic decline, precarious employment, and stark inequalities, and shows how gender, age, class, and kinship have shaped work within and beyond the home.
also be significant at the local level, including within urban economies. In Somalia it is a significant source of local political revenue through corrupt levies and taxes, through profits from renting out NGO compounds and through capturing exchange rate differentials associated with cash transfer programming ( Jaspars and Majid, forthcoming 2022 ). An issue in Somalia, South Sudan and Syria is that local humanitarian actors of
The towns of later medieval Italy were one of the high points of urban society and culture in Europe before the industrial revolution. This book provides more inclusive and balanced coverage of Italian urban life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In looking for the chief features of Italian communal cities, it focuses on: the unity of city and dependent countryside, the stability of population, urban functions, the development of public spaces, social composition, the development of autonomous institutions, and civic culture. The book begins with three of these: Bonvesin da la Riva's innovative description of Milan, Giovanni da Nono's more conventional, but lively description of Padua, and an anonymous, verse description of Genoa. It also focuses on the buildings and their decoration, and urban 'social services'. The book then addresses Italian civic religion. It explores production and commerce: the effects of monetary affluence, the guilds and markets, government interventions to stimulate production, to regulate exchange, and to control the city's population. The book deals with social groups and social tensions: popolo against magnates, noble clans against each another, men against women, young men against city elders, Christians against Jews, freemen against slaves, food riots and tax revolts, acts of resistance and indecency. Finally, it examines the great variety of political regimes in late-medieval Italy: from consolidated communes such as Florence or Venice, to stable or unstable 'tyrannies' in Pisa, Ferrara or Verona.
5 Jobs to people: livability, governance, and strategic planning Policies and markets People to jobs? Or jobs to people? Changing the sequence is not just a word game because the implications for policy at every level are significant. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban economies attracted people to jobs when surplus labor shifted from agriculture to manufacturing, and when firms or sectors in decline in one region – mining, textiles – were succeeded by firms or sectors in expansion Âelsewhere – oil production, aviation. This is still going on, but
1 We are where we are, but how did we get here? If cities are the motors of the economy, how are they powered? Dynamo, motor, generator: if cities are the motors of the economy, why are they neglected in policy agendas for a sustainable recovery? That cities are underperforming is beyond dispute at a time when unemployment remains high and the economy is running well below capacity. Wait for the problems in finance and credit to be resolved and for deficits to go down, the logic goes, and urban economies will start to expand again, adding jobs. To avoid a
the first industrial region Urban growth and the prosperity of towns and townspeople were clearly associated with a variety of new and resurgent urban functions. It was also associated with the emergence of increasingly specialised urban economies. Towns were differentiated not merely by size, but also by their economic, social and cultural activities and functions. This specialisation brought with it greater inter-dependence and interaction.86 Notwithstanding Estabrook’s recent arguments for the cultural separation of urban and rural, towns were intimately tied to
, underlines the need to weigh such evidence carefully before drawing clear economic conclusions from simple totals of freemen admissions. 1 This said, the York register does give a valuable impression of the diverse aspects of the urban economy. As we sharpen our focus to examine the organisation of industry at the level of individual trades, it is natural that we should draw upon the regulations compiled for particular crafts [ 20
cities, risks which are increasingly crossborder because they reflect the inter-connected and inter-dependent character of the urban economy and of urban cultures. How states will manage the international order while protecting cities, and how they will manage urban affairs domestically to check problems at the source, are questions outstanding. The fear that catastrophes such as pandemics or cyber-attacks could be triggered for the economic damage they would cause may be sufficient for states to wrap the security label around many types of catastrophe that have both
labour and the making and maintenance of social hierarchies grounded in class privilege and relative wealth. Drawing comparisons across urban southern Africa, the book provides essential new insights into the nature of gender, work, and urban economies. Labour and gender in Lusaka Lusaka is the ideal focus for examining the history of domestic service, and of labour and gender