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Re-visioning Indian cities: The Urban Renewal Mission, by K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, is the author's view of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The book takes the readers from the inception of JNNURM to where the Mission is today (till the time of writing the book)-giving statistical details along the way. The book weaves other events, programmes and legislations into the story of JNNURM, and at different points brings out what should be done so that a systemic change in urban management could be brought about. There is a great deal of emphasis in the book on legal and political aspects of urban management and how these can hinder or improve urban governance.The recognition of the fact that India no longer lives in its villages but also in its cities and towns is the starting point of the book. The author points out that the economic and political reality of the country's cities and towns came to be recognized only two to three decades after Independence. Yet, he says 'the thinking in India on urban issues has been sporadic at best'. Since the 1970s, a number of programmes for providing basic services and alleviating urban poverty have been implemented, which are listed in Chapter 1. The author states that the setting up of the National Commission on Urbanization under the chairmanship of Charles Correa was a 'significant initiative to understand the scale and nature of urbanization in the country'. The Commission suggested the setting up of a National Advisory Council for Urbanization, which was never implemented.The JNNURM, the biggest urban sector programme till date, subsumed many earlier programmes and schemes of the central government. The Mission which, at the time of launch covered 63 cities, now covers 65 cities. The author questions whether the JNNURM is a project or policy response as there is a general preoccupation with projects more than policy and reforms.The author emphasizes the need for rational selection of cities for large programmes like JNNURM. He feels that some of the selected cities do not need funds-such as Delhi and Mumbai. On the other hand, industrial cities such as Sindri or Barauni, which have slums and can do with some financial assistance to improve, but have not been selected. He feels that states could have been asked to undertake the city development plan exercise first, which could have been used as a pre-qualification for inclusion of cites in the JNNURM list. However, under JNNURM, cities were selected first and city development plans were prepared later.He points out that accessing funds under JNNURM was originally expected to be 'performance oriented with incentives and competitiveness among cities'. However, funding under the mission ultimately followed the Planning Commission's 'centrally assisted schemes' criteria, which was based on the states' population size. This allowed larger states to get higher allocations. This, he states, is a highly simplistic Environment and Urbanization ASIA 2(2) 321-323

Globalization has transformed cities, regions and countries, positively and negatively, depending on which side of the fence one is standing on. While there have been many success stories attributed to globalization, there is also a flip side, which has lead to dispossession. The neglect and marginalization of the poor in the process of globalization and urbanization, both in the economic and spatial sense, is the subject of the book edited by Swapna Banerjee-Guha.The book is an adequate attempt to bring a number of well known urban scholars under one umbrella. Chapter 1, by Swapna Banerjee-Guha, places cities in the global context and brings out the impact of globalization on the poor and on the organization of urban space. In Chapter 2 David Harvey looks at the people's rights to the city and in Chapter 3 Saskia Sassen looks at the global city in some detail. Chapters 4-10 are case studies of various cities:

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