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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THIS RESEARCH REPORT explores living conditions in a poor urban neighbourhood in Zimbabwe and, more specifically, the experience of “multi-habitation” – the situation in which people who do not define themselves as a household share space that is designed for use by one family.
BETWEEN 1990 AND 2020, the urban population of the Asian/Pacific region is expected to increase from 991 million to 2.44 billion.
THE RESEARCH ON which this report is based looked at the connections between the “sustainable livelihoods” framework and issues of transport, mobility and accessibility in Zimbabwe and Uganda – in part to determine the utility of the livelihoods approach in identifying the mobility needs of the p
THIS PAPER REVIEWS the options for the development of public/private partnerships in the management of urban infrastructure services in the South.
ACTIVITIES IN THE construction sector are complex, highly dispersed and resource demanding. The sector contributes to the loss of important natural assets and imposes severe stress on the environment.
FOOD SECURITY TENDS to be viewed from a rural perspective. This special issue, based on a research program underway at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), provides a welcome exception.
Both these books are on a topic that will interest readers of Environment and Urbanization – the urban “slums” and informal settlements that now house around one-sixth of the world’s population.
IN TROPICAL CLIMATES the indoor humidity and outdoor humidity are often the same, and this paper looks at the implications of this for furniture produced in temperate regions (e.g. Europe) but exported to the tropics.
THIS PAPER describes the hazards which can occur when dealing with four major classes of potential pollutants, namely paints, timber preservatives, formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds.
THIS PAPER IS based on the author's experience of establishing a maintenance system for rural health buildings in Kenya between 1988 and 1995, and discusses administrative and organizational issues.