Book notes
Urban centres across the world are unprepared for the "disruptive risks" they now face. Highly unlikely disturbances are occurring more frequently. Established hazard patterns are shifting. Multiple crises are unfolding concurrently. A disturbance in one part of the globe is felt in another.
This book collects over 100 brief essays on specific terms/concepts that critique exclusionary development models and suggest alternative pathways forward. These range from the relatively commonplace (e.g. “human rights”) to the more esoteric (e.g. “sea ontologies”).
This handbook offers general principles, brief examples and sample checklists, rather than an exhaustive examination of the cross-mainstreaming of climate change and gender.
On the one hand, there’s Tanzania. Though drivers make up a minority of urban residents, they tend to be the wealthiest and most powerful ones; thus infrastructural planning favours them.
This policy brief attempts to place COVID-19 risk in its urban context, exploring the types of precarity that especially expose low-income people in overcrowded and underserviced urban areas. It situates the coronavirus crisis alongside the urban housing crisis and the climate crisis.
Placemaking with Children and Youth: Participatory Practices for Planning Sustainable Communities is the product of two parallel initiatives: the Growing Up in Cities programme of UNESCO and the Child Friendly Cities Initiative of UNICEF.
While physical battles have conventionally been waged in large open spaces, today’s wars are neither conventional nor neatly geographically demarcated.
Broken Cities talks to housing need in the global North and South. While not intended to be published to coincide with COVID-19, the pandemic highlights the significance of housing quality for wellbeing. This is a scholarly text, in terms of the depth of referencing and data analysis.
From the ground up is a provocative and searching call to arms for the humanitarian sector. It acknowledges that this sector has long been committed, at least rhetorically, to localization of aid.
This collection brings together four new essays and links them to papers previously published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research on the topic of language in cities.