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 PUBLICATION PRESENTS the findings and conclusions of a four-person all-African fact-finding mission team of land and housing rights specialists, who visited Zimbabwe in September 2000 on behalf of COHRE to investigate the current land crisis.
IN A CONTEXT of rapid urbanization in the South, this report argues that land is a basic resource for urban development. For efficient land management, information on its location, use and tenure is necessary.
IN HIS FIRST book, The Other Path, de Soto advocated the formalization of informal settlements. In his new book, The Mystery of Capital, he takes this a step further: formal property ownership, he argues, is the reason capitalism triumphs in the West but fails everywhere else.
This research report seeks to enrich our understanding of policies that are appropriate for urban expansion.
LAND IS FUNDAMENTAL to any strategy for poverty reduction. It is both a basic resource for ensuring livelihoods and a cornerstone of political and civil enfranchisement.
THIS BOOK IS an account of the contested spaces left behind by the apartheid legacy in South Africa, a legacy of spatial containment designed to enforce and ensure white supremacy, and how the issue has been tackled since the end of apartheid in 1994.
THIS COLLECTION OF articles, from a large and varied group of contributors, focuses on the main themes in the debate on land regularization and access by the poor to urban land.
This book critically explores the possibilities and limits of the concept of a “Just City”, offering practical and theoretical lessons for planners seeking social justice in urban areas.
THIS WORK SEEKS to provide some general principles to guide the processes of institutional development in the context of Third World cities. It is intended as an instrument for policy makers, city managers and development agencies to promote sound urban institutions.