Umar G.Benna and Shaibu BalaGarba (Eds.) Population Growth and Rapid Urbanization in the Developing WorldIGI Global, 2016. 358 p. $198.85.

The reader who looks past the generic title of this volume will discover two noteworthy and uncommon themes. First, several chapters explore the connections between water scarcity and urbanization in regions of either seasonal or perennial water stress. Second, the countries surveyed include some (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States—with a focus on Jeddah, Dubai, and Doha—and Algeria) that are plagued by such environmental challenges, yet too often go overlooked in international comparisons of urbanization. Authors Never Mujere and Trust Saidi (chapter 10) provide a comprehensive treatment of the implications of water scarcity in a small northern Zimbabwean township, producing a portrait of a complex system of two-way dependencies between water supply and the supply of electricity. Patrick Cobbinah, Dennis Okyere, and Eric Gaisie (chapter 12) develop similar themes on a broader canvas, making effective use of a range of materials for Ghana, including survey data on sources of drinking water outside the piped water system, and selected city-specific statistics demonstrating the variation across cities in the source and nature of water stress. Adnan Abdulhamid and Aliyu Barau (chapter 2) bring the tools of hydrology to bear on dryland regions in the environs of Kano (northern Nigeria). In companion chapters by Chirisa and colleagues for Zimbabwe (chapter 4), Cobbinah and Erdiaw-Kwasie for Ghana (chapter 5), and Adams and Opoku for sub-Saharan Africa (chapter 14), these tightly focused studies of water stress are set in the context of urban population growth and its many challenges for urban management. The chapters would have benefited from references to the broader scientific literature on water scarcity such as found in the climate-change syntheses of the IPCC, and, at the local level, from reflections on the many community-based efforts—the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi is the best-known—by which associations of the urban poor have organized to successfully connect their slum neighborhoods to the water system of the broader municipality. The hydrological–engineering–demographic perspectives of these chapters leave the roles of civil society somewhat under-examined. In other chapters of this interesting volume, one finds an evocative study of the difficulties of maintaining the identity of historical city neighborhoods in Gulf-state cities (Djamel Boussaa, chapter 9), where once-vibrant communities appear likely to survive only in artificial, almost theme-park form, and an analysis of sustainable urbanization in the hyper-arid environments of Saudi Arabia (Abubakar and Aina, chapter 3). The most ambitious chapter in its demographic reach is that of Chen, Zhang, and Gong for China (chapter 6), who attempt to link population aging to urbanization in a country undergoing astonishingly rapid change in both of these demographic dimensions. If not wholly convincing on the empirical connections, the investigations of Chen and colleagues are nevertheless valuable in highlighting previously unexplored points of connection between two of today's major demographic trends.