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
The importance of effective institutions for development is well established. There is, however, a continuing debate on how to stimulate institutional reform within highly complex political and cultural contexts.
This paper discusses who eats what in China and why, with a focus on understanding the evolving axes of inequality with regard to access to affordable, safe and nutritious food in the context of changing rural–urban linkages.
Few cities in South Asia have been affected by violence more than Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and economic centre. This working paper examines the impacts of the city’s declining security situation on the control and contestation of public space.
Rights on the edge of the city: the right to water and the peri-urban water committees of Cochabamba
In cities with water sectors characterized by high degrees of informality, implementing the human right to water poses certain practical and political challenges.
Rapid urbanization and industrialization have had multiple impacts on rural Vietnam since economic reform in the mid-1980s. In 2006, the authors conducted a study of the social and economic transformations in three rural settlements in the area often described as Vietnam’s rice bowl.
The relationship among sustainable development, disaster risk management and climate change adaptation has not been treated in depth by many international institutions, national governments and localities in the past 20 years.
Published just ahead of COP 21 in Paris, this report provides readers with an evidence base, clear key messages, and useful maps and infographics.
This volume addresses a gap in planning policy and literature regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) inclusion. Some urban officials have deliberately sought to exclude the queer community by conflating its needs with those of “adult businesses”, such as in Atlanta.
This report forms part of the UN-Habitat series “Housing Practices: country experiences of designing and implementing affordable housing programmes”.
The challenges regarding climate change and climate change adaptation are wide and complex. Managing Climate Risks in Coastal Communities focuses on the need to address climate change risks, local climate preparedness and collective risk management.