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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Addressed mainly to staff directly working with low-income communities, such as health workers and community volunteers, this guide compiles examples of low-cost technologies to improve accessibility to water and sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Metropolitan areas in the United States are able to generate innovations and be engines of economic prosperity and social transformation.
As the process of urbanization across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Central Asia unfolds, violence and the fear of violence are gaining currency as one of the major threats of urban life and quality of life.
This book is a detailed account of how an affordable, low-impact cohousing scheme was conceived, negotiated, designed, financed and built in Leeds (in the UK).
Managing Systems of Secondary Cities is a path-breaking and original report on the relevant role secondary cities – particularly those in low- and middle-income countries – have and will have as the world completes its urban transition.
In this edited volume, Dominique Lorrain invites authors to explore infrastructure-related challenges of governing Shanghai, Mumbai, Cape Town and Santiago de Chile through looking at the profound changes that have occurred in their institutional structures since the late 20th century.
This reports on conditions in 60 informal settlements in and around Harare, with details for each of their locations (so many of them far away from the city centre), origin (many formed by those evicted from other sites had large increases in their population from evictees), population, land area
Descubriendo Uganda (Exploring Uganda) is a reflection from the Argentinian author Sonia Roitman on her experience working with an NGO in Kampala.
Based on seven case studies, Building Together gives a personal reflection of successes and struggles of advocacy, architecture and planning, and citizen engagement projects in Africa, Europe and the Americas.
The ecological feminists Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva have published a second edition of their widely known book after 20 years, once again fighting passive consumerism and social decay with a straightforward and radical analysis of patriarchal structures that reflects and re-envisions their mode