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 report presents the findings of a study of the interactions and linkages between the urban centre of Aba in Abia State (south-eastern Nigeria) and five peri-urban and rural towns and villages in the same state.
Rural-urban interactions include 'spatial' linkages - flows of people, of goods, of money and other social transactions between towns and countryside - and 'sectoral' interactions - rural non-farm employment and urban agriculture.
Small towns play a significant role in the economic growth and urbanization of China, attracting migrants from rural areas and other urban centres. Between 1978 and 2007, small town residents as a proportion of the urban population increased from 20 to 45 per cent.
With more than 8 million of its 88 million population living and working abroad, the Philippines has a long tradition of international migration, both independent and supported by a number of government programmes.
In recent years, the poverty rate among fruit farmers in the rural Mekong Delta has declined more rapidly than among all rural households in the region and in Vietnam overall. This is despite huge fluctuations in export markets for fruit in the last decade.
WITH HIGH POPULATION density and limited land availability, Vietnam’s Red River Delta is undergoing a major transformation as its economic base moves away from subsistence farming towards intensive, high-value food production for export and local urban markets, and non-farm employment.
THIS PAPER IS the report of a seminar held in preparation for the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) that took place in Cairo in September 1994.
This report brings together the main findings of case studies conducted since 1998 in Kumasi, Ghana, and Hubli-Dharwad, Karnataka, India and, since 2000, in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
THIS PACKAGE OF ten briefs, put together by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), provides a succinct overview of a range of important issues related to urban food security.
Authored by two planner/architects, this book on participatory planning is at once highly ambitious and modest in its aims. In the introduction, the authors acknowledge: “…it is unlikely that the reader will find many new ideas in this book.