Behind the beautiful forevers: Life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity

摘要

How do we study public health in cities of the developing world? Data on local urban realities are scarce. Modelling how the environment, communities and individuals interact is complex. But the greater challenge may be conceptual: key ideas in urban health, such as social networks and hierarchies, can be narrowly construed. When studies focus on the objective properties of networks, such as their density or instrumental functions, they miss the meanings that people attach to their social relationships (Hall and Lamont 2009). Largely North American and European in provenance, the concepts insufficiently account for forms of urbanism in the global south (Roy 2009).