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 PAPER DESCRIBES the concept of woodless construction, including a comprehensive description of the technology, its historical background, construction techniques and the training of builders.
BUILDINGS IN LOW and middle income countries are often designed without taking sufficient account of the climate. Factors such as the urban surroundings or site characteristics, orientation and architectural design of the building and choice of building materials are not given enough importance.
THIS IS A special issue of the journal of the Society for International Development (SID) which has a series of articles that are the result of a conference organised by the World Health Organisation, SID and the Rockefeller Foundation as a collaborative effort.
THIS VOLUME SUMMARIZES the results of the first phase of the Integrated Programme on Urban, Regional and Global Air Pollution: Mexico City Case Study, directed by Luisa Molina of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and Nobel laureate Professor Mario Molina.
INNOVATIVE STRATEGIES TO enhance shelter finance based around the strengthening of savings and savings organizations can transform conventional finance into a catalyst for empowerment and development.
This paper is about the current and potential role of community-driven initiatives to significantly improve the lives of hundreds of millions of slum dwellers and squatters at local, city and national levels.
THIS BOOK COMES from IIED's Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods (SARL) Programme which seeks to promote and support rural development based on sustainable agricultural and land management practices, strong rural organizations and dynamic social enterprises.
THIS DISCUSSION PAPER draws on published literature and experience from the field to review participatory approaches to monitoring environmental change.
BILATERAL AGENCIES ARE now showing increasing interest in urban poverty related issues and programmes.