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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Mobility, Modernity and the Slum spans multiple fields: cultural sociology, urban studies, development, and more. These varied perspectives meet to discuss “Slumdog Millionaire”, the award-winning 2008 film that follows a “slumdog” contestant of an Indian game show.
This book seeks to make sense of many changes China has undergone in recent decades, which have reshaped the nature of Chinese urbanism: privatization, decentralization, state-led business and industrialization.
This book compares Berlin and Los Angeles, the “homeless capitals” of Germany and the United States. The comparison is appropriate as both countries have a good deal of devolved local authority, but with differences in social welfare regimes.
This book addresses the conceptual, practical and research challenges that contemporary pedagogy faces when adopting transdisciplinary approaches and a relational perspective to public space.
This is a UK-focused sociological account of gentrification. Its theoretical foundation is hegemony and its practical component is ethnography.
In 1898, Garden Cities of To-morrow – the peaceful path to reform was published. The movement that book sparked led to the first-ever Garden City, Letchworth (UK).
Accountability is a concept many refer to without much attention to its meaning. In The Political Economy of Aid and Accountability, Helen Tilley, a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, critically scrutinizes this concept.
Forming part of the “Another city is possible” series written in anticipation of the Habitat III conference in Quito in 2016, this collection of 23 case files on participatory budgeting (PB) challenges dominant conceptions of urban futures for cities in a way that goes beyond anecdotal experimen
This bilingual book offers a view into the current state of Austrian landscape architecture as illustrated by the Nextland collection.
This guide manages to concisely describe urban policies dealt with by government and non-governmental actors. These shape and are shaped by numerous social, economic, political and ecological challenges that are particular to urban living.