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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URBAN GROWTH IN sub-Saharan Africa is often unsupported by economic growth and the development of the manufacturing and service sector.
This book is far more interesting than its title might imply. It should also be read by anyone interested in urban development because of the way it explains the social, economic, political and physical underpinnings of what census data actually shows.
This book is the outcome of the author’s two decades spent studying the territorial and social dynamics of large West African cities, and focuses particularly on the capitals of Ghana and Mali.
This volume on urban agriculture in Africa and Latin America gathers primary research from 12 graduate students, who were supported by the International Development Research Centre’s AGROPOLIS programme.
This presents tools to assist municipal policy makers, local organizations and other stakeholders seeking to support urban agriculture and is illustrated with many case studies.
URBAN AGRICULTURE HAS been largely ignored and even treated with active hostility by governments and policy makers. It is frequently regarded, in much the same way as informal sector activities were in the 1970s, as a transitional and inappropriate retention of peasant culture in cities.
THE DEFINITION OF URBAN as something “non-agricultural” means that the existence of agriculture in cities has often been underplayed. However, research in eastern and southern Africa is beginning to highlight the importance of urban food production as a survival strategy for the urban poor.
THE AIM OF this report is to show that urban agriculture can yield benefits such as community and economic development, environmental, health and educational improvements, stimulating leisure activities and sustainable neighbourhoods.
THE PAPERS IN this edited collection were presented at the international conference on Sustainable Urban Food Systems held in Toronto in 1997.
THERE ARE NOT that many books on urban agriculture in Africa, so this one on urban agriculture in the capital of Ghana is a welcome addition to the literature. The book consists of ten chapters.