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 working paper documents research carried out on the protection of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in urban communities in Somalia, providing an evidence base for improved humanitarian protection.
Over 60 per cent of the world’s refugees live in urban environments, but host governments often restrict their right to work, forcing urban refugees into precarious and often informal economy livelihoods.
What Works for Africa’s Poorest? is a collaborative work by Lawson, Ado-Kofie and Hulme, which highlights and learns from examples of development programmes in Africa, with specific attention to their effectiveness for the poorest of the poor.
This paper explores the faith context of displacement and settlement for the Sikh and Christian Afghan refugees and Muslim Rohingya refugees in Delhi.
Following the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Tamil Nadu lost about 8,000 people, and the lives and livelihoods of over 897,000 families were affected.
Lebanon’s urban spaces have been shaped by regional and national conflict. Basic services, including water provision, have long suffered from fractured urban planning and extensive informal urbanization.
In surveying how recent famines differ from those in previous eras, Mass Starvation makes some provocative points. One is that the incidence of modern famine is exaggerated, partly because of media cycles and political calculations.
Children driven from their homes — by conflict, poverty or other difficulties — are a particularly vulnerable group, with a range of urgent physical and emotional needs.
Space Invaders departs from the premise that “there is a geographical logic to all forms of protest” (page 1). To understand a range of recent protest movements, it uses a radical geography lens.
Policymakers and donors are calling for a paradigm shift in humanitarian response in urban areas: moving away from processes focused on individuals or households to approaches that intervene at a larger scale.