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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The Asia–Pacific is a highly complex and heterogeneous region of 3.6 billion people. It includes some of the most populous nations as well as tiny island countries, and one of the world’s wealthiest countries as well as 14 of the least developed ones.
THIS 10th ANNIVERSARY issue of PLA (Participatory Learning and Action) Notes explores the theme of participation, literacy and empowerment.
THIS IS THE latest edition in the long series of United Nations publications that bring together statistics on urban, rural and city populations. Its subtitle sums up its coverage - “Estimates and projections of urban and rural populations and of urban agglomerations”.
The way in which poverty is defined and measured influences who is considered as poor, how the state responds and how successful the state responses are judged to be.
This paper describes a new kind of finance agency, Urban Poor Funds, that are now in operation in 10 nations and that serve federations of savings groups formed by slum or shack dwellers or homeless people.
This describes the innovative poverty reduction programmes set up by the Urban Community Development Office (UCDO) in Thailand and how this fed into a new institution into which its programmes became integrated – the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI).
In the last 15 years, savings-based community mobilization and organization have grown to maturity. In many nations, these activities have gone from being small initiatives to major programmes reaching thousands of citizens.
This report reviews the experience of a large water project in Kibera, Nairobi.
"URBAN AGRICULTURE HAS been overlooked, underestimated and undereported…” begins the foreword to this volume prepared for the Habitat II conference last year.