THE VOLUNTARY CITY assembles a rich history and analysis of large-scale, private and voluntary, community-based provision of social services, urban infrastructure, and community governance to restore the vitality of city life. Such systems provide education, transportation, housing, crime control, parks and recreation, health care, employment, and more, by being more effective, innovative, and responsive than those provided through special-interest politics-as-usual and bureaucracy.

The Voluntary City reveals how the process of providing local public goods through the dynamism of freely competitive, market-based entrepreneurship is unmatched in renewing communities and strengthening the bonds of civil society.

Fast public transport, fancy shopping malls, fusion food joints... Delhi has them all. But, what about a disposal system for its filth ? 7000 tonnes of garbage gets generated every day ! There is much media coverage about workshops for awareness building among citizen groups, designer bins in lieu of dhalaos and hi-tech self-loading systems for periodically heaving the containers for final dumping under expert foreign supervision. The reality, however, is that waste in public places is becoming even more conspicuous every day. In this study, the incorrigible problem of invisibilising a city's waste in a safe manner has been demystified.

Excerpts from the Foreword:

“This is a wide-ranging and comprehensive study of the issue of solid waste management in the city of Delhi... Dhamija's research shows how the efforts of the Government of Delhi between 1998-2003 in the backdrop of judicial intervention, and complemented by policies of the Union government resulted in the successful adoption of practices of sustainable solid waste management....

“This book enhances our understanding of both the relatively technical issues of environmental degradation, as well as the issues of policy, institutional reform and governance, and the links between these. It should attract a wide readership of academics, policy makers, members of civil society organisations and not least the civically minded citizen.”

— Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal
Centre for the Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi

This book should have been written years ago. It reveals a dark secret of the ideological environmental movement. The movement imposes the views of mostly wealthy, comfortable Americans and Europeans on mostly poor, desperate Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. It violates these people’s most basic human rights, denying them economic opportunities, the chance for better lives, the right to rid their countries of diseases that were vanquished long ago in Europe and the United States. Even worse, in league with the European Union, United Nations and other bureaucrats, the movement stifles vigorous, responsible debate over energy, pesticides, biotechnology and trade. It prevents needy nations from using the very technologies that developed countries employed to become rich, comfortable and free of disease. And as a consequence, it sends millions of infants, children, men and women to early graves every year.