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 COMES out of an urban research initiative coordinated by the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada, which also covers Africa, the Arab World and Asia.
THIS EDITED COLLECTION is one of a number of publications that have reported on research supported by the Global Urban Research Initiative (GURI) – in this case, studies by Asian researchers.
THE PASSAGE OF the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution of India (known as the Panchayat and Nagarpalika amendments, respectively) represent a significant attempt to change the structure of Indian government to ensure decentralization and a greater voice for people.
THIS ANTHOLOGY CONSISTS of the contributions of urban researchers in India, all of whom were associated with the Global Urban Research Inititaive (GURI), the purpose of which was to assess the state of urban research in the South.
THIS BOOK EXPLORES the electoral geography of seven countries in Southern Africa, namely, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. The research for this book was conducted over several years during the 1990s.
This is a report by Social Watch India, which comprises a coalition of Indian NGOs and other civil society organizations committed to making democratic processes work better through monitoring and evaluating the functioning of key institutions of government.
THIS SERIES OF 13 handbooks, focused on training for local government officials or councillors, has been produced by the UN–Habitat in response to an urgent need for capacity building in many municipalities.
This book on international cooperation is the product of the author's long experience in the development world and of his disillusionment with a system that "...interferes too much in the detail of other peoples' lives and not enough when it really matters." External assistance, he claims, can