1. The Urban Transition in Tanzania: Building the Empirical Base for Policy Dialogue
2. Street Addressing and Urban Management
3. China Urban Development Quarterly
4. Demanding Good Governance
5. China Metropolitan Managment Report 2006
6. The Role of Local Governments in Reducing the Risk of Disasters
7. The Quiet Revolution
8. Innovation and Risk Taking
9. The Challenge of Urban Government: Policies and Practices
10. The Townplanning Mechanism in Gujarat, India
11. Entre la Exclusion Financiera y el Desarrollo Communitario

Entre la Exclusion Financiera y el Desarrollo Communitario

The Spanish version of the book, Financial Exclusion and Community Development, which was financed by DFID in the English version and by Cities Alliance for the Spanish version with support from WBI.  The book includes presentations by NGOs from several Central American countries demonstrating experiences - and logic - of privately financed (i.e. non-subsidized) slum upgrading. It also includes analyses of the situation of informal and unserviced communities in Central America, of the relationship of private banks to informal communities and vice versa (suggesting that the "financial exclusion" is detrimental to both parts) and argues that government policy should focus on stimulating private investment in development and upgrading of low-income communities, helping people to help themselves, rather than subsidizing upgrading of selected communities.  The book concludes with a proposal for a credit enhancement facility in Guatemala (which is actually being implemented). 

 

The Quiet Revolution

This book documents two dramatic, but largely unheralded, revolutionary trends in Latin America and the Caribbean-decentralization and democratization-and argues that policy responses to them by national and international institutions may be smothering the embers of reform at the local level, reforms that are vital to long run sustainability of growth in the region.

Introduction(pdf, 35kb) Table of Contents(pdf, 7.17kb) 

This book reports the findings of a multi-country research project that explored processes of reform at the local level, particularly, innovations in decentralized democracies of Latin America in the mid 1990s.

Introduction(pdf, 28.3kb)Table of Contents(pdf, 8.13kb) 

Innovation and Risk Taking

The Challenge of Urban Government: Policies and Practices

This volume captures work by experts and practitioners in the urban management field focusing attention on such issues as metropolitan management, city strategy and governance, financing urban infrastructure, urban poverty, etc. The book is an attempt to examine wide-ranging issues confronting cities, and to review successful tools, strategies, and practices that have been adopted to address these issues. Most of the edited papers were originally presented at the Urban and City Management Course held in Toronto, Canada, in May 1999.

This book is available at the World Bank Infoshop

Spanish version: Los retos del gobierno urbano 

The Townplanning Mechanism in Gujarat, India

  Download of the document in pdf (2.729 kb)