While macro-perspectives often tend to overlook local specificities and may risk leading to inefficient measurements and erroneous analyses, the micro-perspectives that constitute most of this book shall not ignore the need to put local situations and processes in their context at higher levels. Each level of analysis has its own causalities and the local is not a scaled-down model — a smaller copy of mesoand macro-levels: different factors and differing cause–effect relationships exist at each scale. Hence, this chapter highlights the urban agglomerations and national contexts within which the cities, neighbourhoods and their inhabitants shall be examined later. As it is mostly factual, this chapter demonstrates the difficulties faced in making comparisons, not of processes, but of locations and statistical data in two differing countries, particular since Indian databases have a more limited content than their Brazilian counterparts, notably at the local level (Belle, 2009).
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