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 slick report is an unofficial means of assessing progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
These chapters discuss dispossession in cities including Accra, Colombo, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, London, and Berlin. The range of the case studies shows that this practice is not limited to low-income cities.
Bangladesh has the highest population density of any country, and its variable climate and position on a flood-prone delta make it very vulnerable to climate change.
New Urban Worlds works from the premise that a conventional approach to urban studies, looking at formal systems and broad institutional processes, is insufficient. Instead, it argues, we need to look at the neighbourhood or district level to get at the essence of urban lives.
Cash transfers are increasingly used in urban humanitarian crises. They can stimulate markets and let people choose the help they actually need. But they can also influence gender equality and women’s economic empowerment — for good or, potentially, for bad.
This report documents the nature and frequency of violations of children’s rights in the context of displacement. In 2015, there were 10 million child refugees and 1 million asylum seekers worldwide.
This edited collection seizes upon what its editor calls “the urban moment”, to address some of the most pressing issues affecting cities worldwide. These include globalization, surveillance, feminism, gentrification and sustainability.
With the Syrian conflict now in its seventh year, 13.5 million Syrians need humanitarian aid. But aid in northern Syria focuses inflexibly on food kits that are expensive to administer, designed to satisfy short-term needs. Many people sell their food aid to pay for other urgent needs.
Urban Environments in Africa attempts to fill what Garth Myers argues is a gap in scholarship: marrying environmental and urban studies in African contexts. The book mainly discusses cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, all the way up to the megacities Cairo and Lagos.
A History of Housing in New York City is a captivating book for architects, urban planners and designers, and historians. It is also of interest for anyone wanting to know how New York’s housing has developed into what it is today.