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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Small towns are an essential but often-neglected element of rural landscapes and food systems. They perform a number of essential functions, from market nodes to providers of services, goods and non-farm employment to their own population, as well as that of the wider surrounding region.
The transfer of funds by migrants to their home countries (cash remittances) is at an all-time high. By 2017, it is predicted to rise to US$ 500 billion – and there is a growing policy consensus that cash remittances can be mainstreamed into development.
This paper examines community participation in housing projects for low-income communities in Thailand and how they have sought to “leave no one behind”. Baan Mankong, the government slum upgrading programme, is unique in how it has institutionalized participation.
This book examines urban transport in 12 countries (Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and Vietnam), each of which is allotted its own chapter.
Considering that over a sixth of the world’s population lives in slums or informal settlements, and that so much urban development is characterized by informality, this book is of primary importance to policymaking and development planning.
Investigation of the links between religion and cities has predominantly focused on Christianized countries in the West.
The size of this book is a testament to the significance of remittances, which totalled approx. US$ 583 billion in 2014. The editors explain the aims of this book thus:
Quality of Life in Cities is particularly useful for economists and statisticians, as it is interested more in ways to measure urban quality of life than in the theory or grounded reality of variations in quality of life.
The UK Department for International Development, which recently established a Frontier Technologies Livestreaming initiative, commissioned this report. It examines five categories, comprising two technologies each: