No comments about The Inclusive City: Infrastructure and Public Services for the Urban Poor in Asia (Woodrow Wilson Center Press).

2 comments about The Sound Pattern of English.

1. Tis book kick-started the fields of phonology and linguistics, but it is long since obsolete. It's a work that is based on intuition, and the field has moved on to experimental techniques. Rather, I should say that experimental fields have grown up, like Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics, but linguists in Chomsky's tradition have largely ignored them.
   
   It's a work that describes English, but gives the impression that it is providing deep explanations of English. For instance, it popularized the idea of a "feature" as a basic, atomic entity in linguistics. But, 50 years on, features have led to many publications but few insights that have proved themselves useful outside the tightly knit community that uses them. Speech technology, for instance, never found features to be particularly useful.
   
   It's a Bible among a certain class of linguists, but it's not clear whether it has actually led to much.



2. The Sound Pattern of English (known as "SPE") is the most complete study of the phonology of any language that has ever been undertaken. It is the last word on English stress, vowels, and consonants. It will also tell you everything you need to know about how to write phonological rules, covering complexities like parentheses, parenthesis-star, curly brackets, angled brackets, and everything else. Chomsky and Halle also tell us about their discovery of "distinctive" "features", which are the universal sound system of every language. We owe them a great debt of gratitude for this stunning achievement. "'SPE'" was Chomsky's last work on phonology, so you can see what a loss it was that he decided to switch to syntax.

No comments about The Network Society: A New Context for Planning (The Networked Cities Series).

1 comments about Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back.

1. The unique contribution of this book is its methodology in analyzing urbanization and global change as part of one system, but consisting of different scales/levels. While numerous books have concentrated on globalization and its impacts on the sustainable city, this one emphasizes interdisciplinarity and makes the technical understandable to everyone regardless of academic background .
   
   Edited by 2 world known experts, the Director of the Human Settlements Program of the International Institute of Environment and Development in London and a Research Fellow of the United Nations University in Japan, this book is a seminal work utilizing systems theory in analyzing relationships between drivers of global change, actors, and responses at various levels and their respective feedbacks. The title says it : ``From local to global AND BACK''. The chapters, written by various professors and experts, deal with environmental challenges and guide the reader through the entire system. The 2 editors are also the lead authors of the chapter on Urban Sytems of the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. Hence, you must read this book if your attention was caught by their urban systems chapter in the MA.
   
   The book discusses details and concrete cases in developing countries mentioned in ``Urban Sytems'' and offers fresh findings. Their diagram alone on integrated assessment of Urban Systems, which includes Actors, Responses, Upstream Drivers and Downstream Impacts, is a valuable contribution to academics, systems analysts, and reseachers who want to understand the dynamics of global change at every scale and as a whole. It is helpful as well to those engaged in Strategic Environmental Assessments, but whose backgrounds are confined to one discipline. This book will help you.
   
   It is indispensable to scholarly understanding of systems dynamics in this age of global environmental change without having to use the much used and abused ``ecosystems approach'' alone nor having to study at MIT to understand causal loops, stocks and flows, which Professor Forster was talking about but not knowing how to apply it to the real world which needs concrete policy solutions. This book makes it understandable to everyone without having to go through the technical jargon.
   
   Having come from multiple backgrounds myself, I am grateful that a book FINALLY and correctly shows the methodology of how interdisciplinarity is valuable in understanding sustainable development. I particularly appreciate the incorporation of ecosystem impacts at one level, economic impacts at another level, and health and community impacts at another level. There is no one level of impacts in working for sustainable development. At last ! This book got it right.
   
   It does not omit the concept of ecosystems at a specific scale when discussing social impacts. Perhaps other authors omit it because they cant explain it. It reminds the reader that the goal of sustainable development is not only the sustainable city, but a sustainable world.
   
   Very thorough research all over. Truly a gathering of experts. Highly impressed with the correct synthesis of approaches towards the sustainable development goal.

No comments about Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning and American Cities.

No comments about Capital Cardiff, 1975-2020: Regeneration, Competitiveness and the Urban Environment.

No comments about European Charter for Solar Energy in Architecture and Urban Planning.

No comments about Arcade: Artists And Place-Making.

No comments about Cities & Cultures (Routledge Critical Introductions to Urbanism and the City).

No comments about Cities, Design and Evolution.