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 UK Department for International Development, which recently established a Frontier Technologies Livestreaming initiative, commissioned this report. It examines five categories, comprising two technologies each:
This stakeholder guide – intended for city leaders, local practitioners, and local policymakers – provides suggestions for localizing the Sustainable Development Goals in cities.
The shopping mall has proven to be an unsustainable and declining form of consumption across the US and Europe. Yet Latin America has seen rapid construction of malls in recent years, as part of a boom in real estate investment and speculation catering to the growing middle class.
The magnitude of urban disasters in areas with high population densities – combined with complex social, political, economic and institutional environments – has challenged the manner in which humanitarian agencies are used to working.
This anthology emerged from the 2014 Ørecomm Festival of communication and development. The book is an attempt to bolster the field of communication for development, particularly its theoretical underpinnings (or ComDev). It has three distinct sections:
The magnitude of urban disasters, high population densities, and a complex social, political and institutional environment have challenged the manner in which humanitarian agencies are used to working. Humanitarian agencies are now grappling with how to change their approaches to this reality.
Traditionally, the humanitarian sector has responded to emergencies in rural contexts; however, an increasing number of urban crises has necessitated a re-evaluation of standard procedures.
Urbanization offers substantial opportunities to reduce poverty, in part because it is more cost-effective to meet many basic needs in cities than in rural areas.
Lebanon’s refugee crisis has highlighted the need for much closer coordination among the various organizations and local authorities involved in the response. This paper analyses existing collaboration mechanisms in relation to the Syrian crisis in Lebanon.
On 8 November 2013, the city of Tacloban was devastated by Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest typhoon on record to make landfall. Despite crippling damage, the local government strove to coordinate recovery efforts towards a better, more resilient city.