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/)
Search the database
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.
More than a million tourists visited informal settlements in 2014, largely in South Africa. Frenzel points out that this is not a new trend; in previous centuries wealthy Londoners “slummed it” in the impoverished East End, while white New Yorkers did the same in black Harlem.
The poor in cities are faced with dual challenges: housing shortages and increased vulnerability to climate change impacts, given the location of their houses as well as their capacities to recover.
Drawing upon examples of street vendors in Hanoi, this study explores gendered strategies to adapt to change and transform, and how street vendors’ responses, in turn, shape the current informal food systems in Hanoi.
Growing urban demand for food – which now constitutes about 60–70 per cent of food consumption in Asia and more than half in Africa – is met largely by trade. This paper reviews evidence for what this trade means for rural areas, and for successful rural economic transformation.
Saving the Environment in Sub-Saharan Africa presents the collaborative research of William Markham (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA) and Lotsmart Fonjong (University of Buea, Cameroon).
Gender, Asset Accumulation and Just Cities is truly a collective endeavour led by its editor Caroline Moser.
Stemming from the Design for Urban Disaster conference at Harvard University in 2014, Urban Disaster Resilience explores the concepts of “urban” and “disaster” within the framework of “resilience”.
This report summarizes a series of studies carried out by a multi-disciplinary team of Thai scholars. It focuses on the dynamics of urbanization and climate change risks, and on the linkages among urbanization, climate change and emerging patterns of urban poverty and vulnerability.
The exponential increase in Karachi’s population, the change in its demographic indicators, the spatial spread of housing, and the geographical concentration of livelihoods opportunities mean increasing transport pressures.