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 provides suggestions for inclusive delivery of financial services through mobiles (or m-finance). M-finance rollout and research in the global South have generally not targeted people on the lowest incomes, and this paper attempts to address that gap.
The multiple and complex interconnections between rural and urban spaces, people and enterprises, and how these affect poverty and food insecurity, are all too often overlooked. Small towns are an important but often neglected element of rural landscapes and food systems.
Alongside the slow food, slow fashion and slow travel movements is slow urbanism, as promoted in this book. Mega-Urbanization in the Global South tells cautionary tales about cities or city districts that have grown more quickly than their environments or population dynamics allowed.
This working paper analyses livelihood transformations and rural-city connections in sub-Saharan Africa to identify some key policy areas for rural development. The empirical analysis builds upon qualitative fieldwork conducted in Cameroon, Ghana and Tanzania in eight different research sites.
The first page of Slum Health provides a kind of mission statement from the authors: “we aimed for Slum Health to be responsive to and offer a practical guide for all those interested in improving the lives of the urban poor around the world”.
AIDS and Masculinitiy in the African City draws on several periods of fieldwork in Bwaise, an informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda. Wyrod writes that in Bwaise, AIDS is a common presence, and has been reshaping gender relations over decades (albeit in limited ways).
This paper aims to inform future policy by providing a critical analysis of grassroots finance models.
Caught between Spaces, a Lund University doctoral dissertation, seeks to understand the vulnerability and wellbeing of low-income peri-urban populations in the two Colombian cities of Soacha and Bogotá.
In India, a new funding mechanism has transformed shelter options for low-income households and supported community-led development.
Edited by Diane Archer, Sarah Colenbrander and David Dodman, Responding to Climate Change in Asian Cities illustrates the overarching importance of urban adaptive governance for building climate resilience and thus sustainable development.