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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Policymakers and donors are calling for a paradigm shift in humanitarian response in urban areas: moving away from processes focused on individuals or households to approaches that intervene at a larger scale.
Au Niger, les inondations se situent en deuxième position des catastrophes naturelles après les sécheresses. Dans la ville de Niamey, l’arrondissement communal 5 situé sur la rive droite du fleuve Niger subit de façon régulière des dégâts liés à cette catastrophe.
There is increasing awareness of the importance of humanitarian agencies supporting and collaborating with local actors in order to restore city functions following humanitarian crises.
Ce rapport présente les résultats d’une enquête qualitative sur le phénomène du vigilantisme en Haïti.
The authors of Seeing like a City acknowledge their title has been used before, but they openly borrow it. The scholarship in this book presents “cities as forcing houses” (page 1).
Angola’s civil war caused a massive population movement from rural conflict areas to low-lying coastal zones. More than half of Angola’s 27 million people now live in urban coastal settlements, floodplains and steep ravines vulnerable to climate extremes.
This large compendium explores the importance of writings about a city to how cities become embedded in the popular imagination. V.S.
Protracted conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have left tens of millions of people in need of humanitarian and development assistance to have access to water.
Remaking the Urban Social Contract is edited by Michael Pagano, the director of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Urban Forum.
Infrastructural Ecologies, by Hillary Brown and Byron Stigge, is an encouraging book full of case studies that illustrate what possibilities exist for emerging economies with serious deficits in infrastructure provision.