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 GUIDE STARTS with the premise that “History adds new questions to development thinking, and adequate research tools tend to lag behind” and sets out to overcome this inadequacy by giving practical suggestions and describing field study methodologies which can be used as effective tools for n
THIS BOOK EXAMINES the links between rapid urbanization in the Third World and mental illnesses which, despite the fact that they tend to receive less attention than diseases with high mortality rates, are of great importance in terms of their cost to society and the suffering of individuals.
THIS IS THE latest in a series of books from the United Nations University Programme on Mega-cities and Urban Development. It is divided into 11 chapters, each written by a prominent urban planning scholar or expert in the field.
THE UN DEFINES megacities as urban agglomerations of 10 million or more inhabitants and it is predicted that, by the year 2015, there will be 27 megacities in the world, 17 of which will be in the Asia and Pacific region.
THIS BOOK WAS prepared for the UN World Summit in September 2005 to emphasize the central role of local organizations in meeting the Millennium Development Goals – in local food and farming systems, in securing land and property rights in Africa, in conservation (especially through community cons
Published by the Museum of the City of New York and Columbia University Press, New York, this is a large format book with a detailed but accessible description of the far-sighted Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 and how this has shaped and guided the city’s expansion and development until today; there
THIS BOOK PROVIDES INSIGHT into how different countries in the developing world have responded to the neo-liberal agenda of market enablement and its associated processes of globalization, structural adjustment and urban management reform.
Through a series of beautifully drawn and presented maps, graphs and photographs, this Atlas tells the story of Lebanon’s transformation. It provides a cartographic synthesis of all the available data on Lebanon and its population.
PLA NOTES IS published three times a year, in February, June and October, by the Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods Programme of IIED.
This includes detailed descriptions of local government finance in different regions of the world.