"Insurgent Public Space" is an anthology of unauthorized appropriations of city spaces, temporary events and guerrilla actions that resist commercial infestation and social exclusion.The volume was conceived in 2007 at the Sixth Conference of the Pacific Rim Community Design Network, a loosely connected group of community-based activists and scholars who meet approximately every two years to discuss grassroots planning and design.

In "Learning the City" Colin McFarlane retells a story about the political strategies employed by activists involved in the Mumbai Slum Dwellers Federation (MDSF). Jockin Arputham, the founder of MDSF, narrates how the organization discovered that they could use the public phone for free by “inserting a railway ticket into the receiver”. Such technical savvy was not, however, just a strategy used to keep the organization’s phone bill down.

Alpa Shah has written a brilliant ethnography of life in the small village of Tapu in northeast India, and the potential contribution of her book extends far beyond debates on indigenous life in the subcontinent. "In the Shadows of the State" is an excellent analysis that cuts across several themes: the operation of tribal political orders, the dangers of some strands of indigenous rights and environmental activism, and the transformations of state practices as they are reproduced through class hierarchies and sometimes violent networks.

Adrian Franklin’s book is a well-crafted, and often loving, homage to the urban form. A welcome palliative for at times anthropocentric and ahistoric urban studies, Franklin traces the development of the lived city.

One might assume that the book would proceed to discuss the evolution of geographic information systems, which has grown in sophistication in recent years, both in the quality of its analytical capabilities, as well as in its representational qualities. The book’s focus is not this, however, instead focusing on a small group of design professionals who have worked with new capabilities in information graphics to experiment with ways of interpreting the complexities of contemporary landscapes.