Alison Brown

The importance of public space in supporting city economies and in contributing to poverty reduction is rarely recognized. Instead, public space is more often an arena for contest--between municipal governments or other vested interests, and street traders, whose activities are proscribed by restrictive social norms, ambiguous legal status, street violence, or an official response that vacillates between indifference and eviction. This book breaks new ground in linking literature on the informal economy, urban livelihoods, and public space. Based on a research study in four developing cities - Dar Es Salaam, Kumasi, Maseru, and Kathmandu - it explores the survival strategies of street traders and their relationships with city governments. It concludes by exploring the practical and policy implications for pro-poor street management. This book is essential reading for all those interested in innovative city governance.

In 1925, Beatrice Blackwood of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum took thirty-three photographs of Kainai people on the Blood Indian Reserve in Alberta as part of an anthropological project. In 2001, staff from the museum took copies of these photographs back to the Kainai and worked with community members to try to gain a better understanding of Kainai perspectives on the images. 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' is about that process, about why museum professionals and archivists must work with such communities, and about some of the considerations that need to be addressed when doing so. Exploring the meanings that historic photographs have for source communities, Alison K. Brown, Laura Peers, and members of the Kainai Nation develop and demonstrate culturally appropriate ways of researching, curating, archiving, accessing, and otherwise using museum and archival collections. They describe the process of relationship building that has been crucial to the research and the current and future benefits of this new relationship. While based in Canada, the dynamics of the 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' project is relevant to indigenous peoples and heritage institutions around the world.