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 BOOK EXAMINES the nature of governmental–non-governmental cooperation based on 34 case studies from Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe. Each case study is summarized at the back of the book.
THE CASE STUDIES presented in this book come from four carefully chosen low-income settlements which represent different physical and socioeconomic conditions within Karachi, and which have undergone different kinds of development processes.
COMMUNITY FUNDS ARE an alternative to traditional formal aid systems, which so often end up squandering resources on projects that fail miserably. As this newsletter puts it, traditional aid tries to impose straight lines on a world that is full of squiggles and zigzags.
“FACE TO FACE” was produced by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, part of a larger grassroots coalition which also includes groups in southern Africa and which supports exchange programmes between people in poverty who are committed to working in solidarity to address their
Realigning Actors in an Urbanizing World; Governance and Institutions from a Development Perspective
THE EXTENT OF change in conventional development models in recent decades is remarkable.
THE “NETWORK” IS a pervasive organizational image in the new millennium. As described by Manuel Castells, networks contribute to the new social morphology of our societies.
THE CASE STUDIES presented in this book come from four carefully chosen low-income settlements which represent different physical and socioeconomic conditions within Karachi, and which have undergone different kinds of development processes.
IN THE FIRST few days of February 2000, over 8,000 families invaded a piece of desert land in the southern part of Lima, Peru.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF “community action planning” within the innovative housing programmes of Sri Lanka has long been of interest to practitioners of housing and urban development in the South.
Humans are social beings who need interaction for survival but today, our societies are inventing some threats that could reduce social interaction.