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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Vernacular Regeneration deals with urban change, specifically the urban regeneration project underway in Johannesburg’s inner city.
Urban Geopolitics aims to bring geopolitics into the mainstream of urban studies to enhance an understanding of cities as contested nexus points of social, spatial and political change.
The Act of Living is a life study of two men, 49-year-old Haile and 39-year-old Ibrahim, from Arada, Addis Ababa. Haile and Ibrahim grew up “in secure poverty”, in circumstances that meant they spent plenty of time on the streets from a young age.
South-South Development investigates the current resurgence of South-South collaboration (SSC), unleashed after the Forum on Chinese Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in 2006.
Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City explores how socially engaged art can influence and challenge how we live in, imagine and think about our cities – something that is increasingly dictated by neoliberal and technocratic visions.
Climate Change, Vulnerability and Migration explores the impact of climate change on migration, particularly on the socioeconomically poor who are disproportionately vulnerable and bear the worst impacts from climate change-related events.
The emerging megacity of the book’s title is Hyderabad, a quickly growing city of about 9 million people in the southern Indian state of Telangana.
Dead Labor attempts to conceptualize a political economy of premature death, arguing that this can be characterized by an emerging “necrocapitalism”. Under necrocapitalism, the social relations of capitalism condition premature death through the unequal commodification of living labour.
Tomatoes & Taxi Ranks is based on the findings from the Consuming Urban Poverty research project.
Social Sustainability, Climate Resilience and Community-Based Urban Development argues that built environments implemented according to a socially aware planning process can support pro-community behaviours that (1) contribute to daily social sustainability and (2) help strengthen climat