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 Politics of Slums in the Global South: Urban informality in Brazil, India, South Africa and Peru
This book aims to understand the politics of slums, particularly how struggles for secure housing and improved living conditions in substandard Southern settlements reveal the power struggles and tensions of urbanization processes.
This publication draws on several years of fieldwork to provide readers with potential lessons from Colombia’s history of conflict and convergence, as well as the continued military and diplomatic efforts.
This book argues extensively that while there is no direct relation between poverty and systematic and organized violence, factors like persistent social exclusion, the opportunity to generate extra-legal income and power, and the absence and failure of government institutions lead to “new violen
Written by a builder and occupant of her own eco-home, Sheffield Professor Jenny Pickerill brings us Eco-Homes – a book that unpicks the complexities of social, geographical, and political issues surrounding eco-homes, and that thus helps us to understand much of the resistance to buildi
With empirical analysis of Can Tho City, Vietnam, this book attends to the critical question of how socioeconomic transformation processes affect vulnerability related to natural hazards.
This book reports on two projects piloting basic income transfers in Madhya Pradesh, India. In projects funded by UNICEF and coordinated by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), the 6,000 residents of nine villages received a very modest amount for 1 ½ years: Rs.
In the Public’s Interest examines how evictions of informal settlers allow us to challenge, and therefore better understand, the dynamics of contemporary urbanism.
Cities on a Finite Planet builds upon and goes beyond the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) chapter on urban areas. Written by the same team, this book is one of the first bridges between AR5 and the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle (AR6).
Security in the Bubble: Navigating Crime in Urban South Africa is part of the Globalization and Community series.
Bringing together sociological and non-sociological development scholars, Development in Crisis presents an interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges that face development today and potential sources of crisis in development in the future.