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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There has been a contentious relationship throughout history between water and cities. Cities need water for their existence; yet their very existence threatens water resources and supply, and degrades water quality.
Planetary Gentrification, by Loretta Lees, Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto López-Morales, explores two principal questions: Does the concept of gentrification have a global application, and does generalized gentrification really exist?
Humanitarian crises in cities require responses that reflect the urban context, address urban challenges, and provide urbanised solutions. This paper focuses on providing guidance on good practice in cash for work (CfW) programmes.
Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa is a collaborative effort of the Isandla Institute, the African Centre for Cities, and others.
This is a follow-up to the 2001 Handbook of Urban Studies, and shows the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of scholarship that falls under the urban studies label. The editors explain in the introduction that they deliberately avoided a linear approach to editing this collection.
Urban areas are now home to over half the global population as well as two thirds of the world’s refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs).
It’s clear that there’s a massive lack of affordable housing worldwie – McKinsey estimates that this affects 330 million urban households, and the number will grow as the urban population does.
This edited collection discusses the notion of “precarious neighborhoods”. This is part of a strand of research that attempts to go beyond the legal/illegal divide and the dualistic formal/informal vision (pages 13 and 15).
Since the majority of urban displaced live in informal settlements or in rental accommodation without formal lease agreements, tenure insecurity – the risk of forced eviction – is a defining feature of their lives. Finding housing solutions in emergencies in large cities is extremely complex.
Across the Middle East and North Africa, water utilities are increasingly struggling to maintain services during protracted conflicts. To become more resilient, they need to tackle long-standing vulnerabilities that let the impacts of conflicts accumulate.