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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Increasing urban expansion and the accompanying changes in land-use patterns are leading to a silent crisis by destroying ecosystems and the services they provide to support the poor, as well as affecting the resilience of urban areas.
In Neighborhood as Refuge, Isabelle Anguelovski challenges conventional wisdom in the field of urban environmental justice by arguing for a renewed focus on the roles of place, community, and a sense of wellbeing in how urban neighbourhoods rebuild after environmental trauma.
This report describes a finance facility that provides seed capital to support community-led upgrading in informal settlements in South Africa. Called Masikhase – the Community Upgrading Finance Facility (CUFF) – this shows what communities can do with modest financial support.
This paper examines the vulnerability of migrant workers in the informal sector in three Indian cities (Kochi, Surat, and Mumbai), specifically in terms of livelihoods, climate change and health inequities.
This study examines the local impacts of economic crises and reform on the textile industry in Karachi, with a focus on the informal power loom sub-sector and the low-income settlement (Dibba Colony) where it operates. A number of undocumented issues relating to these impacts include:
As climate change threatens low-income communities with intensified environmental risks, the need to provide mechanisms to help low-income households cope with these risks grows.
Based on detailed analyses of the post-war development of planning processes and regional institutions, the author makes the provocative argument that the extensive decentralization of Atlanta was a process actively enabled and coordinated across political scales by public institutions engaged in
This book describes public service innovation and leadership that are based in and emerging from the understanding of particular places, and thus have the potential to create inclusive and sustainable cities.
Building on her previous book The Purpose of Planning, which was written before the financial crisis starting in 2008, Yvonne Rydin reconsiders her messages on urban change and the involvement of private development markets, public actors and local communities in city planning from the a
Written in a lively and engaging style organized around a series of journeys, this book pays attention to the opportunities and strengths of the modern transport system in the UK, while addressing problems related to the inclusive development of more sustainable transport.