ABSTRACT
The rapid urbanisation of cities in the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa is creating a convergence of urban economic and population growth, climate change, poverty and insecure energy futures, creating huge landscape pressures on these often understudied cities and requiring significant infrastructural investment in urban retrofitting programmes. In these cities, alongside the growth of consumption patterns across the middle classes and elites and the needs of international commerce and finance, the requirements of urban poor communities continue to dominate debates around infrastructural investment and the need to retrofit housing, energy, sanitation and other networked systems. Slum improvement projects provide a long history of attempts by the local and regional state institutions to retrofit urban poor areas, while new global environmental challenges and technological advances open emerging retrofitting pathways around low-carbon futures, climate change adaption and the rise of the green economy.
