Summary
Contents
The SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding.
Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension.
Key Concepts in Urban Studies:
Clearly and concisely explains the basic ideas in the interdisciplinary field of urban studies; Offers concise discussions of concepts ranging from community, neighbourhood, and the city to globalization, the New Urbanism, feminine space, and urban problems; Constitutes a re-examination of the key ideas in the field; Is illustrated throughout with international examples; Provides an essential reference guide for all students and teachers across the urban disciplines within sociology, political science, planning and geography.
The Informal Economy
The Informal Economy
The informal economy is defined as the combination of workers within urbanized areas that are ‘off the books’, goods produced in unregulated factories with non-unionized and undocumented laborers, goods and services produced and exchanged for barter (i.e., not cash, but in kind) and goods and services sold without regulation on the streets. In some countries the informal economy is so large as to rival the money exchanged in the formal sector.
Only recently has the presence of an informal economy in urbanized places been recognized as an important subject for analysis in its own right. Prior to that reconception, people viewing poor and ghettoized areas conceived of them in terms of economic deprivation alone. Now we understand that, in many cases, residents of areas excluded from the formal opportunities of ...
