Divya Upadhyaya Joshi - Urban Spaces and Gender in Asia

World leaders adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Providing in-depth knowledge, this series fosters comprehensive research on these global targets to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change.

The sustainability of our planet is currently a major concern for the global community and has been a central theme for a number of major global initiatives in recent years. Perceiving a dire need for concrete benchmarks toward sustainable development, the United Nations and world leaders formulated the targets that make up the seventeen goals. The SDGs call for action by all countries to promote prosperity while protecting Earth and its life support systems. This series on the Sustainable Development Goals aims to provide a comprehensive platform for scientific, teaching and research communities working on various global issues in the field of geography, earth sciences, environmental science, social sciences, engineering, policy, planning, and human geosciences in order to contribute knowledge towards achieving the current 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

This Series is organized into eighteen subseries: one based around each of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, and an eighteenth subseries, Connecting the Goals, which serves as a home for volumes addressing multiple goals or studying the SDGs as a whole. Each subseries is guided by an expert Subseries Advisor.

Contributions are welcome from scientists, policy makers and researchers working in fields related to any of the SDGs. If you are interested in contributing to the series, please contact the Publisher: Zachary Romano [Zachary.Romano@springer.com].

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15486

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

There are many people who have made this book possible and whose help we would like to acknowledge. We are grateful to all the people who were involved in the International Conference that led to this book. The Conference, held in November 2017 in New Delhi, was made possible due to the funding from the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi and Uttarakhand State Council for Science and Technology (UCOST), Dehradun, India. At Kumaun University, Nainital, India, we thank its Vice Chancellor, Prof. Dinesh Kumar Nauriyal, whose enthusiasm for the project and mentoring remained crucial for its completion.

We express our gratitude to all our colleagues, who have generously given their time and incisive comments on the drafts. We thank Linda Lane, Namrata Chindarkar, Tess Del Rosario, Yvonne Chen, Ame Berges, Robin Bush, and Naomi Aoki and Pushpesh Pant for reviewing the chapters included in this book.

Our sincere thanks go to all the editorial team members at Springer and especially to Prof. R. B. Singh, the Co-Editor of the Sustainable Development Goals Series, for their trust, support and encouragement throughout this journey.

Finally, we thank our friends and families for emotional sustenance in this venture, especially our children Ananya, Gabriel, Oliver and Tristan for being so considerate and caring, often sacrificing their time with us so that we can pursue our academic work.