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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Community water supply and wastewater services – water services in short – will face major global challenges in the decades to come. To feed into related discussions, this book showcases lessons from the development of Finnish water services for international readers.
Pakistan is experiencing an unprecedented urban housing crisis.
The Nocturnal City has an interesting premise: studying urbanism from a temporal rather than a spatial standpoint. As it states early on, “A key aim of this book is to put the night front and centre in the research agenda” (page 2).
This book applies an interdisciplinary lens to the study of border spaces, including their relationships with the built and natural environments. The section most relevant to urban areas is the alliterative Part III, on “Corridors: Catalysts and Collaboration in Confined Spaces”.
This guide to Urban Community-Led Total Sanitation (U-CLTS) was developed in collaboration by the Institute for Development Studies, Practical Action and Plan International. It is intended for practitioners and CLTS facilitators in urban areas.
Building the Cycling City is authored by a Canadian couple, who decided to give up their car as a lifestyle experiment.
Adapting urban spaces to a rapidly ageing population is an important task for many countries. It’s particularly urgent in Singapore, where the population aged 65+ is projected to double by 2030, to 25 per cent.
This is a brief but detail-oriented look at the complexity of water and sanitation arrangements in Dhaka’s low-income settlements.
Akin to delving into a good novel, City on the Verge narrates the story of the BeltLine project in Atlanta since its inception in 1999 as a Master’s thesis.
This book critically interrogates the normative and analytical links between the concepts environmental justice and urban resilience. The authors start from a critique of the assumed reciprocal normative relationship between these two concepts.