Book notes
Investing in Urban Resilience, by Santos and Leitmann, is a flagship report that succinctly “explores the rationale for increasing investment in the resilience of cities and their citizens to natural disasters and climate change” (page 12).
Since the 1980s, Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) has worked to place the urban poor at the heart of the politics and economics that make modern cities unequal and exclusionary.
A History of Brooklyn Bridge Park is co-authored by the head of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy (formerly the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition) and a freelance journalist.
Recoded City: Co-creating Urban Futures is a visionary book, which documents past and current experiences of participatory placemaking in order to demonstrate future possibilities.
Written in collaboration among Li Zhang and Min Zhao (two Chinese academics) and Richard LeGates (a US academic), Understanding China’s Urbanization brings Chinese research and insight to a Western audience and makes valuable connections and comparisons.
Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South explores the gendered nature of seven broad topics: land/housing, services, health, violence, mobility, productivity, and politics/governance.
In many ways this is a book about relationships – for instance, between Mumbai’s urban poor and local government, between recent migrants and longer-term slum residents, and between property developers and politicians.
This edited collection emerged from the work of the Newcastle Fairness Commission, a civil society group that formulated justice principles to influence the policy of the Newcastle City Council.
Karachi, a city of around 20 million people, is facing a crisis of governance that is reflected in the poor state of service delivery, and in unplanned and unsustainable urbanization.
Twenty years ago the grassroots movement Muungano wa Wanavijiji emerged from Nairobi’s many slums to resist evictions by the Kenyan government. It confronted the nexus of politicians, government administrators and the elite to acquire the lands that the slums occupied.