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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India’s population has trebled since Independence in 1947 and it seems headed for a total of at least 1.5 billion by 2050. This book examines how population growth will affect India’s future development and discusses how it can manage this last phase of its demographic transition.
THIS BOOK IS a guide for policymakers, planners and engineers. It is aimed at officials of donor/lending agencies and their partners in national and state level government ministries and departments who propose to identify programmes for improving services for
This is a wonderful book by one of the most influential development thinkers.
This book examines the work and roles of non-governmental organizations in development, and considers the criticisms that their increased profile and role in development have attracted.
THIS BOOK EXPLORES the evolution of international law since the Second World War, and the new American attitude of withdrawal and unilateralism.
Based on up-to-date evidence and a well-structured theoretical articulation (from Dependency Theory, Systems Theory and Regulation Theory), Biel observes the history of capitalism as an expanding process of exploitation of the world’s social and natural systems.
This short book is targeted at young development professionals. It presents stories as a way of deconstructing the complexity of development processes and bringing out some details from practice, and of presenting these to young practitioners to stimulate questioning and reflection.
In many large Asian cities, planners have begun to clear informal inner-city settlements and replace them with commercial and middle-class neighbourhoods, seeking to project an image of modernity and prosperity to foreign investors.
This volume is based upon the author’s doctoral research and questions the widespread assumption that democratic decentralization will foster good governance and participatory, inclusive planning.
WITH THE MILITARY regime over, the new 1988 Brazilian constitution promoted political and financial decentralization as well as measures to improve social rights.