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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This book begins with a funeral. In the Durban settlement of Kennedy Road, Zithulele Dhlomo, a 27-year-old scrap metal collector, died in the two-room shack he inhabited with four other families. A candle set the plastic sheet walls on fire, and Dhlomo burned to death.
Atlas of West African Urban Food Systems is a snapshot of the food systems of Tamale, Ghana and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
This is a sequel of sorts to The High Cost of Free Parking, which was published in 2005. The introduction to Parking and the City is a condensed update of the earlier book, followed by 51 chapters by a range of authors. The chapters mainly draw on examples of American cities.
Adapted from the abstract:
Shaping Cities in an Urban Age, published by art press Phaidon and funded by a nonprofit branch of Deutsche Bank, is a glossy, heavy, image-rich brick of a book.
The Millennial City explores how urban residents born between 1980 and 1997 are reshaping city life. Its chapters are grouped into sections on economics, housing, mobility, and projections for the future.
Thailand’s cities are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and are already struggling to deal with these impacts. Making urban areas like Bangkok as safe and resilient as possible must be a policy priority for local and national governments.
Trash isn’t just about trash, and Garbage Citizenship isn’t solely about urban rubbish collection in Senegal’s capital.
Transgressive Citizenship and the Struggle for Social Justice kicks off with a crucial period of activism in São Paulo: the Jornadas de Junho (Days of June) in 2013, a year before the costly and contentious World Cup tournament.