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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The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated over 250,000 “persons of concern” were in Egypt at the end of 2015. That does not include people who have not approached UNHCR, or those who applied unsuccessfully for refugee status – the “closed files” group.
Gaza, a mostly urban and densely populated area, chronically experiences complex emergencies, with bouts of acute violence. Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is aggravated by the exposure to ongoing and acute political violence.
Asian cities are on the frontline of climate change. A third of all low-elevation coastal zones in the world are located in Asia, where two-thirds of the world’s urban population reside.
Common Space: The City as Commons is the first of its kind, providing a theoretical approach to problematizing space in the city as commons and not only as a state-managed space or commodity.
At first glance, Joel Kotkin’s The Human City may appear anti-urban, with its advocacy against urban densification policies. But it is Kotkin’s prioritization of the future of cities that drives this book.
Paradoxes of Green is an unusual kind of scholarly book.
In India, peri-urban areas are too often neglected. They are fraught with institutional ambiguity, unplanned growth, poor infrastructure and environmental degradation. Many peri-urban inhabitants live in poverty and face increasing marginalization and food insecurity.
This book’s title is deliberately provocative. The author, a journalist and University of New Mexico faculty member who has covered water issues for decades, sets out to disprove the idea that in the Colorado River Basin of the western US, “water is for fighting over”.
This document is part of the “Better Evidence in Action” toolkit.
Urban warfare in Syria has had a devastating impact on besieged civilians targeted by deliberate aerial bombing and human rights abuses.