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 issue of D+ focuses on the work done by local and regional authorities to engage with citizens and fight for increasing power for local-level engagement in advance of Habitat III (the 3rd UN Conference on Human Settlements).
Decarbonising Cities explores how urban development can be harnessed to minimize natural resource depletion and climate change. Instead of discussing environmental problems at length, it focuses on potential solutions – with cities at the core.
David Henley, Professor of Contemporary Indonesia Studies at Leiden University, here tackles a thorny question: Why have sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia experienced such divergent development paths in the past half-century?
As part of the series PoliMI SpringerBriefs, published by Springer and Politecnico di Milano, this is a short and technology-focused work. It shows how the data from mobile phone networks and other technological sources might be used to assess urban mobility.
Fittingly for a book written by the editor-in-chief of The China Chronicle, a media website based largely on travel writing, this is a journalistic and personal account of a less analysed phenomenon of Chinese development.
This book provides an overview of health geography, the sub-field of human geography that applies to medicine and health. The cases are very varied. For instance, one chapter explores the limited resources and geographical challenges (e.g.
A thought-provoking book, The Future of Development builds upon the recognition that “development” is a political concept.
The Informal American City is a response to both increasing informal urbanism in the United States and the simplistic notion that informality is only a negative or marginal aspect of urbanization, to be discouraged or ignored.
Land Access and Resettlement: A Guide to Best Practice seeks to limit the negative impacts of natural resource exploitation and infrastructure projects, such as mining operations and dams, on local communities.
This handbook brings together academics, practitioners and policymakers to explore a wide range of issues in gender and development.