Environment & Urbanization

World leading environmental and urban studies journal

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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2020

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.

2019

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”).

2015

This handbook offers general principles, brief examples and sample checklists, rather than an exhaustive examination of the cross-mainstreaming of climate change and gender.

2020

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.

2020

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.

2018

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.

2020

While physical battles have conventionally been waged in large open spaces, today’s wars are neither conventional nor neatly geographically demarcated.

2020

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.

2020

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.

2019

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.

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