Book notes
This edited volume approaches the Covid-19 pandemic as both a crisis and an opportunity. Handwashing has become a mainstay of public health advice regarding coronavirus, and thus there has been abundant attention to the accessibility and affordability of water.
Panic City lays out its thesis statement early and explicitly: “The central argument of this book is that heightened anxieties about the perils of everyday urban living have spilled over into an obsession with security, in which an oversaturation of ominous signs of vulnerability has
This book emerged from a small academic community: students or teachers of material culture at University College London (UCL). Each contributor covers a specific residential or public location in London, paying attention to the interactions between people and places.
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.
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”).
This handbook offers general principles, brief examples and sample checklists, rather than an exhaustive examination of the cross-mainstreaming of climate change and gender.
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.
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.
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.
While physical battles have conventionally been waged in large open spaces, today’s wars are neither conventional nor neatly geographically demarcated.