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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A decade ago, public and private water and sanitation were typically presented as very distinct alternatives. Today effective governance is more often presented as a necessary ingredient of private service provision.
While large private water companies grab the headlines, it is more often small private vendors that bring water to the urban poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Between the handful of multinationals that dominate the international market, and the millions of informal enterprises that can be found in so many deprived urban neighbourhoods, are a growing number of local water companies finding new markets for water and sanitation.
This is the overview paper, which draws on the six case studies described below. It notes that virtually all poverty reduction is local in that it has to produce tangible improvements on the ground and involve local organizations.
This paper considers how the official poverty line in India would have to change if it were to be set at a level that allowed urban households to afford minimally adequate accommodation.
This paper discusses the impacts on children of different ages of the increasing risk of storms, flooding, landslides, heat waves, drought and water supply constraints that climate change is likely to bring to most urban centres in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
This paper reviews 23 recent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to consider how they define and measure urban poverty and the extent to which they actually consider urban poverty. Nearly all these papers place a strong emphasis on the relative importance of rural poverty.
This paper discusses the limitations in the income-based poverty lines that are widely used to define poverty and to measure urban poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
This paper describes the water and sanitation programmes that the NGO Development Workshop has developed in Luanda over the last 15 years, working with community organizations, local government and the official water and sanitation agencies.
This describes the experiences of the Philippines Homeless People’s Federation in community-driven measures to avoid disasters, in disaster preparedness and in disaster response.