Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, or a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled US$38 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent.
Microfinance is a category of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings and checking accounts; microinsurance; and payment systems, among other services. Microfinance services are designed to reach excluded customers, usually poorer population segments, possibly socially marginalized, or geographically more isolated, and to help them become self-sufficient. ID Ghana is an example of a microfinance institution.
Accion is an international nonprofit. Founded as a community development initiative serving the poor in Venezuela, Accion is known as a pioneer in the fields of microfinance and fintech impact investing.
The College of Environmental Design, also known as the Berkeley CED, or simply CED, is one of fifteen schools and colleges at the University of California, Berkeley. The school is located in Bauer Wurster Hall on the southeast corner of the main UC Berkeley campus. It is composed of three departments: the Department of Architecture, the Department of City and Regional Planning, and the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning.
The terms poverty industry or poverty business refer to a wide range of money-making activities that attract a large portion of their business from the poor. Businesses in the poverty industry often include payday loan centers, pawnshops, rent-to-own centers, casinos, liquor stores, lotteries, tobacco stores, credit card companies, and bail-bond services. Illegal ventures such as loansharking might also be included. The poverty industry makes roughly US$33 billion a year in the United States. In 2010, elected American federal officials received more than $1.5 million in campaign contributions from poverty-industry donors.
Mike Douglass is an American urban planner scholar and social scientist known for his exploration of rural-urban linkages, migration and international economic competition, focusing on globalization and the rise of civil society in Asia. He is currently on 5-year joint appointment as professor with the Asia Research Institute and Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS).
Mark Andrew LeVine is an American historian, musician, writer, and professor. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
Edward William Soja was an urbanist, a postmodern political geographer and urban theorist. He worked on socio-spatial dialectic and spatial justice.
Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Previously, she was Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
The UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin School of Public Affairs, commonly known as the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, is the public affairs/public service graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles. The school consists of three graduate departments—Public Policy, Social Welfare, and Urban Planning—and an undergraduate program in Public Affairs that began accepting students in 2018. In all, the school offers three undergraduate minors, the undergraduate major, three master's degrees, and two doctoral degrees.
Nezar Al Sayyad is an architect, city planner, urban designer, urban historian, and professor emeritus at the University of California Berkeley in the College of Environmental Design, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Educated as an architect, planner, and urban historian, AlSayyad is principally an urbanist whose specialty is the study of cities, their urban forms and spaces, and their impact on their social and cultural realities. As a scholar, AlSayyad has written and edited several books on colonialism, identity, Islamic architecture, tourism, tradition, urbanism, urban design, urban history, urban informality, and virtuality.
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities. She is specifically interested in the connection and links between an array of social sciences such as; sociocultural anthropology, urban studies, and science and technology studies, as well as medicine and the arts.
The UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) is an interdisciplinary research unit within the College of Letters & Science, Division of Social Science, dedicated to research, teaching, and discussion of labor and employment issues. It was founded in 1945 as the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations. It is one of the two research programs in the University of California system along with the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The IRLE consists of four bodies: the IRLE Academic Unit, UCLA Labor Center, Human Resources Round Table, and the Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program.
Martin Wachs (1941–2021) was an American professor emeritus of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles and of City and Regional Planning and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career in university teaching in 1968 and retired from teaching in 2006, to work at the Rand Corporation until 2010.
Gautam Bhan is an LGBTQ+ rights activist in India as well as a researcher, writer and faculty member at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. As the faculty member of IIHS, he works and teaches politics of poverty, inequality and development in Indian cities with a focus on housing, social security, governance and urban and planning theory. He is also the spokesman for LGBTQ+ rights and one of the petitioners in the legal battle to decriminalize homosexuality in India. He is the coordinator of Program for Working Professionals in Urban Development and co-anchors three major research projects on evictions, urban inclusion, slum up-gradation, and the relationships between poverty, inequality and urban violence.
Jean Paul Bourdier is a photographer and Professor of Architecture, Photography and Visual Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Katharyne Mitchell is an American geographer who is currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Gray space is a theoretical concept that explains the causes and consequences of a rapid expansion in informal and temporary urban development, widely prevalent in contemporary city regions. It argues that the rise of informality reflects a significant transformation of urban regime and citizenship. The concept was formulated by Geographer and urbanist Oren Yiftachel who noted that through a process of 'gray spacing', urban society is increasingly being governed under frameworks of 'separate and unequal', spawning greater uneven fragmentation, conflict and ethno-class stratification. Urban and planning theorists are thus challenged by this theory to reinvent equal and just forms of belonging and resources allocation in the increasingly informal city. In geography, land use planning, and epidemiology, the term 'grey space' is used to refer to urban land covers that are not green, as an antonym of urban green space. Recent work in Leisure Studies has sought to define this urban "grey space" as a material and symbolic feature of outdoor leisure pursuits, like skateboarding.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is a Greek-American academic. She is a Distinguished Professor of urban planning and urban design at UCLA. She is also a core faculty of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative. She served as Associate Provost for Academic Planning at UCLA from 2016-2019, and she has been the Associate Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs since 2010. She was the chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning from 2002-2008. She is a public space scholar and has examined transformations in the public realm and public space in cities, and their associated social meanings and impacts on urban residents. An underlying theme of her research is its user focus, as it seeks to comprehend the built environment from the perspective of different, often vulnerable, user groups.
Faranak Miraftab is an Iranian-American urban scholar and Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is known for her works on urban planning and development. She is a winner of Davidoff Book Award and American Sociological Association's Global & Transnational Sociology section Book Award and a finalist in C. Wright Mills Book Award for her book Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking.
