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

Power and informality interact in complex ways in urban shelter provision. This briefing is based on a study of three East African cities: Nairobi, Hawassa and Mogadishu.

2020

This bilingual book is several things at once. It’s a photography collection, with over 100 vibrant photos documenting the case study cities of Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and London (UK). It’s an interview series, with a few chapters by academics but mostly told through the voices of activists.

2020

The New Urban Agenda (NUA) is one of the major global frameworks seeking to inform urban development policies and practice.

2020

Humanitarian responses to urban crises are focusing increasingly on integrated programming and area-based approaches.

2019

This book responds to a perceived gap in scholarship on housing styles in Middle Eastern cities.

2019

Author Mirjana Lozanovska sets out the premise of Migrant Housing early on (page 2): “In this book, empirical research on the migrant houses in two sites – the village of Zavoj in the Republic of Macedonia, as a place of emigration, and the city of Melbourne, Australia, as city of immigration

2019

The idea that cities are fundamentally unsafe for women, and that women migrating to cities are turning their backs on domesticated safe areas, is not new.

2019

Uganda has a progressive national refugee policy that provides freedom of movement and the right to work, own land and access basic services in urban centres.

2019

Better Buses, Better Cities focuses on US cities, which generally are not known for being bus-friendly. To take one striking example, some crosstown buses in New York City apparently move at half the speed of Hawaiian lava.

2019

Men, women and children who are forced to flee their homes often bear the mental or physical scars of conflict. Refugees’ arduous journeys to urban areas and the conditions they encounter there can present further health challenges.

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