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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As we face pressing and difficult challenges generated from environmental changes, Risk, Resilience, Inequality and Environmental Law examines the ability of environmental law in the 21st century to manage transnational risks, and its compatibility with major environmental management str
“Almost 3 billion people are deprived of at least one basic human need: lack of access to food, drinking water, shelter, basic health services” and “some 19,000 children will die today of easily preventable causes” (page 2).
While environmental damage has in the past been accepted as an unfortunate but necessary victim of capitalism and urbanization, in Regreening the Built Environment Michael A Richards advocates a paradigm shift.
Though Detroit was once the iconic “Worst City of America”, since 2009 Americans have started to celebrate the possibility of the city’s resurgence.
Sustainable Food Systems: The Role of the City is concerned with how we can feed ourselves into the future, and with major aspects of climate adaptation and/or mitigation (page 1).
Experiments is published by Next City – a nonprofit organization that aims to inspire social, economic and environmental change in cities through journalism & events around the world.
Thirsting for a Future opens with a provocative sentence: “No one suffers more from a change in climate than a child” (page 8).
Water and Politics comes at a time when the problem of water delivery to millions of urban residents in the global South is “increasingly fraught with inequality, corruption and social conflict” (page 214).
Self-reliance is, by definition, about individualized responsibility for social wellbeing and economic security. This idea drives urban refugee livelihood programmes, in India and beyond, as aid organizations seek to ensure refugees do not depend on assistance long term.
The Boko Haram insurgency has engulfed many parts of Northern Nigeria since 2010. About 2 million people have fled into urban areas around crisis zones. However, barely 10 per cent of these internally displaced people (IDPs) are sheltered in formal humanitarian camps.