In this article, we revisit the concept of social remittances. First, we show how people's experiences before migrating strongly influence what they do in the countries where they settle which, in turn, affects what they remit back to their homelands. Second, just as scholars differentiated between individual and collective economic remittances, we also distinguish between individual and collective social remittances. While individuals communicate ideas and practices to each other in their roles as friends, family members, and neighbours, they also communicate in their capacity as organizational actors which has implications for organizational management and capacity building. Finally, we argue that social remittances can scale up from local-level impacts to affect regional and national change and they can scale out to affect other domains of practice.

This article explores how the conceptualization, management, and measurement of time affect the migration-development nexus. We focus on how social remittances transform the meaning and worth of time, thereby changing how these ideas and practices are accepted and valued and recalibrating the relationship between migration and development. Our data reveal the need to pay closer attention to how migration’s impacts shift over time in response to its changing significance, rhythms, and horizons. How does migrants’ social influence affect and change the needs, values, and mind-frames of non-migrants? How do the ways in which social remittances are constructed, perceived, and accepted change over time for their senders and receivers?

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It is almost impossible to disagree with a proposal seeking to slow things down to minimize harm to the planet. However, the question is where. The manifesto in The Case for Degrowth acknowledges the challenge of asking distinct populations to lower their economic growth and well-being. They suggest alliances, echoing the commons, and highlight ancient cultural traditions that have envisioned other worlds. In contrast, the discussion offered by Deepak Lamba-Nieves through the case of Puerto Rico and its colonial subjugationshared or equivalent to many in the Global South and elsewhere -asks us to reflect upon who is demanding or expecting us to degrowth.

These findings presented in the book support the idea that there has been a wide variety of situations and models attached to the concept of the 'garden city' in colonial Africa, a characteristic that the authors also found in the case of Palestine, as well as the existence of highly complex multilateral channels in the diffusion of planning ideas, namely a two-way exchange between colonizer and colonized or across colonial boundaries, characteristics that have also been found in other colonial contexts in sub-Saharan Africa. The use of the garden city concept by an urban policy that advocated racial segregation (in Palestine as well as in the African cases examined in this book) corroborates previous findings in other colonies in sub-Saharan Africa on the misuse of this originally progressive urban paradigm for purposes different from those inherent in the European late nineteenth-century model.The idea that urban planning was not a merely technical activity but one deeply embedded in a particular cultural context is a perspective only put forward explicitly in the 1970s and 1980s by the post-rational planning theories, and a perspective I concur with. It is also the point of view adopted in the essays and in the conclusion. This and the differences between the implementation of the garden city model in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century (e.g. suburban self-contained development; community or cooperative developer) and its application in the colonial contexts examined in the book (e.g. low-density residential areas; development under government control) confirm findings in other colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.In sum, all these findings reinforce the idea of an extreme flexibility in the application of this planning model, which in some cases have not been always in accord with the otherwise socially responsible and progressive original idea associated with Ebenezer Howard's famous 1898/ 1902 book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Important to retain is certainly the way the garden city idea was represented in each case examined, the innovations and the planning instruments adopted in the examples brought in by these essays, the individuals and the institutions involved and the impacts these proposals and initiatives had in planning history in general and in each city and country in particular. The case studies included in the book make this volume an excellent and innovative addition to the literature on the history of colonial urban planning cultures in Africa and Palestine.