In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World by Jeremy Seabrook - 1996-05-17

This is an account of life in the vast and ever-expanding cities of South Asia. From Bangkok, Bombay, Dhaka, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur, Jeremy Seabrook brings stories of survival and uncelebrated heroism, stories with uncanny echoes of life in Britain in the early-industrial era. At the same time, he provides an analysis of the restructuring of urban life in South Asia, as the world moves towards a "single integrated economy." The book evokes daily life, with descriptions of collective resistance, together with the extraordinary individual tales of some of the thousands of migrants who arrive daily in these megacities of the South. Jeremy Seabrook pays special attention to the position of labour, both organized and unorganized in these cities, to the unrecorded struggles of industrial workers in the suburbs in Jakarta, or garment-workers in Bangkok. In doing so, he highlights the convergences between North and South, which are likely to become sharper as workers in Britain and other Western countries are forced into even fiercer competition with those of South Asia.

Jeremy Seabrook is the author of The Unprivileged, Mother and Son, The Idea of Neighbourhood, Landscapes of Poverty, Myth of the Market, A World Still to Win, The Revolt Against Change and Victims of Development.

From Publishers Weekly:

Both city and village have been sentimentalized: cities as centers of economic opportunity, villages as places of community, kinship and pooled resources. Here Seabrook, a prolific sociologist (The Idea of Neighborhood and Victims of Development) relates stories of rural emigrants' difficult adjustments to the reality of life in the cities of Southeast Asia on the one hand and how rural residents have been so changed by urbanization that many are psychologically "uprooted" without ever having moved. For Bangkok emigrants, for instance, the transition from rice to currency as the basis of wealth is a confusing one, as nature replenishes rice and any excess is traditionally shared among the rural poor-a harsh contrast to urban acquisitiveness and accumulation. In a touching analogy, Seabrook compares the plight of the industrialized Third World poor and his own upbringing in the industrialized Midlands of Britain while acknowledging how remote the two experiences are. In citing the experience of rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Seabrook points out that hope is "perhaps the greatest resource of the poor," adding that it is an-maybe their only-"infinitely exploitable commodity."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.