Book notes
Engaging our readers in preparing book notes
Our Book Notes section has short descriptions of books, papers and reports that we have prepared on all subjects relevant to urban issues. These are summaries rather than reviews. These go into the Book Notes online database that contains all Book Notes since our 1993 editions. It has facilities for searching by author, title, key word, city or country.
As an experiment, we are opening this to our readers so it can draw on a wider pool of knowledge. So we invite you to send us short summaries of new publications you have read that you found interesting – and relevant to urban issues. Authors may submit summaries too, but not promotional material. We welcome your submission on relevant publications published within the last two years. This includes English-language Book Notes and English summaries of publications in Spanish, French or Portuguese. You will be listed as the author of the summary.
If you would like to submit a Book Note, please search the database on this page to ensure that the publication has not already been covered. Please specify the title, author, publisher, year of publication, number of pages, and ISBN (if applicable). For the description, between one and six paragraphs is sufficient. Book Notes can be sent to Jenny.Peebles@iied.org
(For a searchable database of papers in Environment and Urbanization, go to http://eau.sagepub.com/)
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THE WORKBOOK IS the second product of the project on social auditing, intended as a practical tool for the establishment of social audit systems by small community, cooperative and non-governmental organizations.
At the centre of this extraordinargy book is an acutely observed account of life in a shanty town in a small urban centre close to Recife in north-eastern Brazil.
Zakes Mda explores the history of a mixed race family in small town South Africa. The Madonna of Excelsior fictionalizes the events in Excelsior, Free State, in 1971, when 19 citizens were charged with breaking the Immorality Act that forbade sex between white and black citizens.
This book is the outcome of the work of sixteen Scandinavian students in architecture, landscape architecture and geography, who came to the small traditional town of Mpasatia, Ghana to investigate a range of urban architectural and planning issues.
THIS SHORT REPORT provides a summary of a wide range of literature concerned with micro-enterprises in Southern towns and cities. The discussion begins with some questions of definition, a synopsis of the major issues to be considered and a description of the text that follows.
The Asian Coalition for Housing Rights has a new programme – the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA).
UNTIL THE MID-1970s, interest in small and intermediate towns in sub-Saharan Africa was limited to the analysis of their position in local urban hierarchies based on "central places" models.
The United Nations expects that the number of slum dwellers in the world will increase from its present 924 million to about 2 billion in the next 30 years.
DHARAVI, KNOWN AS Asia's largest slum, covers 175 hectares in Mumbai and is home to almost a million people.
ILLEGAL AND DEPRIVED living areas have increased rapidly all around the world with problems becoming more complex. Despite its image as a prosperous city, the case of Bangalore in India is no different.