Two-thirds of the population of the world are poor, and their number is growing in the first as well as in the third world, despite billions of dollars of aid. The economic development policies of the last two decades, and the theory which gave rise to them, have been discredited. The rich are disillusioned, apprehensive or uninterested, while the poor are embittered and without hope, the victims and agents of ignorance, instability and environmental degradation. The need for radical rethinking is urgent: this book makes an important contribution towards that end. John Friedmann argues that poverty should be seen not merely in material terms, but as social, political and psychological powerlessness. He presents the case for an alternative development committed to empowering the poor in their own communities, and to mobilizing them for political participation on a wider scale. In contrast to centralized development policies devised and implemented at the national and international level, alternative development restores the initiative to those in need, on the grounds that unless people have an active role in directing their own destinies long-term progress will not be achieved. The author takes the household as the strategic starting-point - stressing its moral, political and economic potential - as a source of continuity and as a location for production. From this basis he propounds a politics of emancipation that would enable the disempowered poor to assert their rights. Empowerment provides a morally-informed theoretical framework for a development policy that meets the needs of its recipients rather than of its makers.
This collection of Friedmann's most important and influential essays tells a coherent and compelling story about how the evolution of thinking about planning over several decades has helped to shape its practice. An ideal text for the study of planning theory and history, each of the chapters is introduced by a brief essay to establish its context and importance, and is followed by a series of study questions to help focus classroom discussions, as well as suggested readings.
John Friedmann is internationally known for his pathbreaking work in urban and regional development planning theory. Life Space and Economic Space contains some of his most original and controversial essays on spatial and territorial development in the low-income countries of the world. The essays focus on a conflict he considers fundamental to human existence: that conflict between life space and economic space. By "life space" Friedmann means the bounded territories over which we strive to exert some degree of self-governance and which constitute the human habitat. By "economic space" he means the ubiquitous global space of market relations. Friedman demonstrates the implications of his theoretical position in a number of ways: he examines development in Southeast Asia, introduces the notion of "world cities, " and presents a politico-territorial model of rural development which he calls agropolitan. The analysis extends in wide-ranging fashion from the space of global relations to the most intimate space of the household economy which, when linked to other households, constitutes the economy of the barrio or neighborhood. In a chapter proposing a dual-track model of development, he sketches a model of the barrio economy drawn from Latin American experience and based on social mobilization, collective self-empowerment and political action. Friedmann perceives a global crisis which he traces to the dissolution of territorial relations. This he believes results from penetration of the global system of markets into the remotest corners of the world, undermining traditional cultures and ways of life. The consequence is incipient breakdown, he asserts, and we need to repoliticize spaceand subordinate the power of capital to the collective will of people organized to work toward common ends. This deliberately provocative collection of essays includes an autobiographical fragment providing contextual information about the author.
John Friedmann addresses a central question of Western political theory: how, and to what extent, history can be guided by reason. In this comprehensive treatment of the relation of knowledge to action, which he calls planning, he traces the major intellectual traditions of planning thought and practice. Three of these--social reform, policy analysis, and social learning--are primarily concerned with public management. The fourth, social mobilization, draws on utopianism, anarchism, historical materialism, and other radical thought and looks to the structural transformation of society "from below." After developing a basic vocabulary in Part One, the author proceeds in Part Two to a critical history of each of the four planning traditions. The story begins with the prophetic visions of Saint-Simon and assesses the contributions of such diverse thinkers as Comte, Marx, Dewey, Mannheim, Tugwell, Mumford, Simon, and Habermas. It is carried forward in Part Three by Friedmann's own nontechnocratic, dialectical approach to planning as a method for recovering political community.
This is an authoritative and comprehensive vision of molecular cell biology. Advances in our knowledge of how cells work has driven the discipline to the point where we understand the cell at new levels of complexity such as larger signalling complexes in cells, and cells interacting with other cells. To present this new view of molecular cell biology and the accompanying advances in experimental technology, the fifth edition shows exciting developments in cell birth, lineage and death expanded coverage of signalling systems within the whole cell/organism and expanded coverage of metabolism and movement of lipids. In addition, new pedagogy includes research questions by looking at real experimental data in analysing the data problems and updated perspectives for the future at the end of each chapter, which explore potential applications of future discoveries and unanswered questions that lie ahead for researchers.
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