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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With the goal of making a business case for disaster risk reduction, this report presents indications of a nascent paradigm shift in disaster risk awareness and management among businesses and governments.
THE “NACALA INTEGRATED Urban Development Project”, which was funded by FINNIDA. It includes a description of a resettlement project to move settlements from eroded slopes which had been declared illegal in order to deal with problems of erosion in the centre of the city.
THIS BOOK IS the second of four volumes representing the findings of the first phase of the Global Urban Research Initiative for the Africa region.
THIS BOOK EXPLORES the reasons for fertility change through a comparative study of the process of demographic change in five societies: Costa Rica, Ghana, Kenya and the two Indian states of Punjab and Tamil Nadu.
THIS BOOK IS a response to the widespread failure of countless government agencies to implement planning regulations, standards and administrative procedures that are functional and appropriate to the needs of the urban poor.
THIS EDITED COLLECTION presents a multi-dimensional comparative analysis of two large groups of the world's displaced populations. Refugee populations are generated by conflicts such as war, civil strife and ethnic persecutions, or by natural disasters including famines.
AFRICA IS GOING through a critical period of adversity. Being uprooted is not a new phenomenon but in recent decades it is the direct outcome of the struggle for independence from colonial rule and the ethnic upheavals that were previously suppressed.
THIS SHORT BOOK is second in a series documenting the activities of small-scale solid waste recycling entrepreneurs in urban areas.
THIS BOOK IS sub-titled The Prospects for Reconstruction in Angola from the Community Perspective and is a collection of papers based on research done in Angola in 1996 and 1997.
In The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers explores changing racial identities and the struggle against racism in America through one family’s history. The three Strom children (two sons and one daughter) have a German Jewish émigré physicist father and a black American singer mother.