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/)
Search the database
THIS BOOK DOCUMENTS two dramatic, but largely unheralded, revolutionary trends in Latin America – decentralization and democratization – and argues that policy responses to them by national and international institutions may be smothering the embers of reform at the local level, which are vital t
THE WORD “HOME” is widely used, but not well defined. Its meaning extends beyond that of the house, in both abstract and spatial terms.
THIS REPORTS ON a study in the low-income settlement of Kali Anyar in Jakarta – one of a group of community-based studies on crowding and health initiated in 1991.
TO DATE, THERE has been little precise epidemiological data available on how in-house crowding affects community health.
This report addresses three major threats to human security in cities, namely urban crime, insecurity of land and house tenure, and natural and human-made disasters.
CREDIT CAN BE instrumental in equalizing opportunity and alleviating poverty yet, historically, men and women have not had the same access. Partly due to this, women have been excluded from many previous economic histories.
“WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE the World” is an eloquent and well-researched book which expresses the author’s deeply held belief that the emerging global system of business has become a serious threat to longterm human interests.
The author presents a detailed analysis of how the urban built environment can cope with climate-related stresses, drawing mainly on British examples of adapting housing and energy systems.
THIS PUBLICATION IS essentially an attempt to articulate some of the insights, key themes, and unsettled questions linked to market-based conservation that are more fully explored in the book People Plants and Justice.
IN MANY LOW- and middle-income nations, the old historic towns and villages bear evidence of a rich cultural heritage.