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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CURRENT DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE on poverty reduction mainly emphasizes the respective roles of the state and the market.
EVERY CITY IS unique, but some are more unique than others. Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, is one such. Before partition in 1947, Karachi had some 450,000 inhabitants, half of whom were Hindu. By 1951 it had over a million inhabitants, 96% Muslim and over half refugees from India.
THE GLOBAL POLITICAL economy has undergone rapid changes in the last two decades, which has produced an entirely new setting for urban development in much of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
THIS BOOK ANALYZES the impact of planning models imported from the West in general and Europe in particular on the development aspirations of sub-Saharan Africa.
THIS BOOK IS an exploration of the recent history of Colombia’s capital city through the eyes of one of its most important planners and politicians. Jorge Gaitán Cortés, an architect and urban planner, was also active in politics in the 1950s and 1960s until his untimely death in 1968.
THIS BOOK CONTAINS a series of papers which illustrate the threat posed to public health by environmental pollution in India.
Volume 1: Understanding Change in the Peri-Urban Interface, 24 pages, ISBN 1 874502 05 6. Volume 2: Developing an Environmental Planning and Management Process for the Peri-Urban Interface: Guiding and Working Principles, 28 pages, ISBN 1 874502 10 2.
THIS BOOK, WRITTEN for use in the South, explains how various methods can be used to assign value to different uses of natural resources. Many natural resource uses are not traded in markets and do not have explicit monetary value (for instance, a woman washing clothes in a lake).
Peer exchanges are a learning tool that grassroots women’s development organizations have employed for many years to learn from the experiences of other groups.