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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Sustainable Water is edited by Allison Lassiter and was conceived from her lecture series called “Planning for Water Sustainability in the 21st Century”.
This book tackles class, race and other differences in the Caribbean environmental movement, based on analysis of Willemstad, Curaçao and Kingston, Jamaica.
There is increasing awareness of the impacts of climate change on the health of urban residents. Although Thailand has seen relatively low rates of urbanization compared to its ASEAN counterparts, cities across the country are growing.
Much of India’s future urbanization will be the result of migration from rural areas and small cities and towns. These urban migrants are often invisible, voiceless and powerless.
Conservation for Cities by Robert McDonald widens the traditional concept of conservation, as biodiversity protection, and introduces it as a tool for using nature to improve the lives of city dwellers.
A publication of Down to Earth magazine, Why Urban India Floods reviews the state of urban flooding across India and its relation to urbanization and drainage, which is often neglected.
In Managing the City Economy, Le-Yin Zhang provides a practice-oriented book about managing the city economy, especially in developing countries.
Natural Hazards, Risk and Vulnerability, by Roanne van Voorst, examines the concept of risk behaviour and explores why – if people share the same risks – they express such heterogeneity in their responses.
It’s clear that NGOs have proliferated in recent decades. A 2003 estimate is that “close to 90 per cent of all non-governmental organisations have been formed since 1970” (page 2). Their power has also grown and diversified, at least for international NGOs (INGOs) at the top.
GrEEEn Solutions for Livable Cities proposes an integrated approach to addressing the challenges of sustainable development, combining the 3Es of economy, environment and equity.