Here's the second part of the post I promised.

More books for your curiousity

Here’s Part 1 (with dozens of more books)

Politics and Policy, part 2.

A continued look into politics and power.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro (1974). This is the pinnacle book about the development of the history of New York, framed through the people (person) that were (was) responsible for much of the city’s infrastructure. If you’ve got the time, the 96-hour audiobook is great to save your eyes from 1300 pages.

Race, Class, And Politics In The Cappuccino City by Derek Hyra (2017). This book is DC-specific, and DC has been historically segregated along quadrant lines. This book specifically dives into the “redevelopment” of the Shaw neighborhood in NW, and who got what end of which stick.

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962). Not the first environmentalist, but one of America’s best since Upton Sinclair, Carson’s book is about pesticides, but it’s really about public opinion and power.

St. Marks Is Dead by Ada Calhoun (2015). Most of the time historic preservation is nonsense because the “history” of the thing is usually someone else’s nostalgia. Nostalgia is a powerful, and it’s easily weaponized.

Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality by Patrick Sharkey (2013). The subtitle sort of reads like this one but less ironic. This book puts bootstrapping in sharp relief, as you know, not a thing.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (2017). If you think history and law has fairly treated everyone equally and on merit, well, it hasn’t. “Deliberate” is the word you’re looking for.

The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America by Alan Mallach (2018). For every successful revival, there’s also the question of who wins and who loses. If markets have a blind spot, it’s that those controlling them definitely see color.

Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City by Philip Mark Plotch (2020). Professor Plotch is on here twice, and this book is a perfect crossover between his last one (Politics Across the Hudson) and Clifton Hood’s 722 Miles. I see it as an epilogue of sorts. There’s probably a few hundred more miles of Subway New York Needs, but it if it’s this hard to build 10 miles, good luck in the future, comrades.

The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities by Clayton Nall (2018). This book is an academic study, and it’s written for academics and academic-adjacent readers, but the takeaway is clear: moving people around is a much nastier method to sort and select voters than natural affiliation. There’s a nonzero likelihood that voting with your feet was supercharged into voting with your car.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser (2012). Here’s a chicken-and-egg scenario: is the city for markets or is the city of markets. Depending on your well-rounded perspective, the answer is not inevitably yes.

The Zoning Game Revisited by Richard F. Babcock (1985). A case-driven text about zoning fundamentalism? Sure, sign me up.

The Zoning of America: Euclid v. Ambler by Michael Allan Wolf (2008). This is a biography of the SCOTUS decision to separate noxious uses, and to keep people of color from participating in society.

There Goes the 'Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up by Lance Freeman (2006). I used to think “gentrification” was a nonsense realpolitik word use as a false flag tool for preservationists and bad-faith social justice warriors. I still think this, but Freeman’s work is the only book I’ve ever read that puts the word and its supposed meaning in the same building, let alone dictionary definition.

Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in an American City by Robert A. Dahl (1961). Think of this as the preamble to City Power. Read it, then read City Power again.

Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands by Ben Coates (2015). All policy is cultural, and all culture is human, first. There’s a reason the Netherlands is a cycling mecca and it’s not just topography.

Zoned Out by Jonathan Levine (2005). “A groundbreaking work in urban planning, transportation and land-use policy, Zoned Out challenges a policy environment in which scientific uncertainty is used to reinforce the status quo of sprawl and its negative consequences for people and their communities.” Translation: we don’t know enough and we’ll never know enough so take your medicine.

Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation by William A. Fischel (2015). Ironic double entendre with exclamation point topping is the whole kit-n-caboodle for zoning as a concept.

History

We have to study history to understand why things are the way they are. Planners call the history of place “existing conditions.” So here’s to cities’ past and future history. Every city has its own history, and remember, history is usually told by the winners, so always caveat emptor.

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford (1968). This is the most essential book about city history ever written. Read it quickly and then be done with it because it’s boring as all get out.

Garden Cities Of To-morrow by Ebenezer Howard (1898). The original Garden City manifesto, which promised utopia but gave us segregation instead.

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Michael Wallace (1998). If you pair this (and its sequel) with The Power Broker, you’ve got yourself a full history of White New York.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon (1992). Chicago is America’s “second city,” but it could have just as easily been St. Louis if not for a little capitalism/luck and some excellent geography.

The City Of To-morrow And Its Planning by Le Corbousier (1929). Don’t let architects plan cities.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larsen (2004). This highly stylized account of one of America’s most notorious serial killers intersects with one of America’s most highly publicized and fantastic city events—the 1893 World’s Fair, set in Chicago. It’s not particularly politics or policy, but it’s not fiction either. It’ll sit here until I figure out what else to do with it.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift (2012). It’s now been told. There’s a lot of confusion about who owns what, who’s responsible for what, how things get paid for, and what the purpose of the highways is. This book does its best to give you the tools to try and figure it out.

The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America by Christian Wolmar (2013).

OR

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White (2012).

Pick one of the two books about how railroads shaped the history of the United States, and likely won the North the Civil War.

The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas by Eric Rutkow (2019). The last two books were east-west, this one is north-south, and is as much a modern history of pan-American relations as anything else I’ve ever read. Turns out the Monroe Doctrine was more about posturing than actual leadership.

The Seattle Bungalow: People and Houses, 1900-1940 by Janet Ore (2006). The Pacific Northwest developed much differently than the East Coast or the Midwest, and lots of the laid-back culture is expressed in this now-typical housing style.

Transportation

How we get around, where we’re going and where we’re from is key to all planning. Here’s a few books to help put all of it in perspective. And hopefully where we can go moving forward.

Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit by Steven Higashide (2019). Why are buses better than trains? What’s the point of transit? Is mediocre transit better than no transit at all?

Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality by Chris & Melissa Bruntlett (2018). It took the Netherlands 50 years to shift their culture from car to bike, but wow was it worth it. Love a little apocrypha, too: in 2017 there were only 5 “accidents” involving bikes in all of Amsterdam—actual accidents, not crashes.

Elements Of Access by David M. Levinson / Wes Marshall / Kay Axhausen (2017). This manual is now open access (free) to read. It’s a great translation guide for planners and engineers who are trained to speak different languages, it seems, almost on purpose.

Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker (2011). Shout out to an amazing transit primer—also, you know, don’t judge book by its cover.

Segregation By Design by Jessica Trounstine (2018). This one’s new, but in case you didn’t get the message, or were looking for more anecdotes to help explain how the way people live in cities isn’t libertarian paternalism but a dedicated effort to divide, this is your book.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Kahn (2017). JSK was an outstanding DOT commish, and her leadership gets full credit for pedestrianizing Times Square—and a handful of other tweaks that changed New York.

Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit by Christof Spieler (2018). It’s a coffee table book or an essential handbook. Spieler’s versatile book explains and shows without pedantry. A must read.

The High Cost Of Free Parking by Donald Shoup (2011). Shoup is the godfather of parking policy; this book is 800 pages of parking policy. It’s the only evidence we need to mandate auditing how we store our metal death machines.

Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion by Anthony Downs (2004). Congestion wastes money; but no congestion means no economic development either. Downs’ book is a good primer, but make sure to not take his (or any word) too literally.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac (2019). F Uber.

The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro by Zachary Schrag (2006). The equivalent text to 722 Miles. It’s here to showcase that either could be here, or in politics and policy.

Critical Theory

The study of why we behave the way we do and how humans interact is the foundation of all city building and policy discussion. Study these to better argue why we need don’t need a new 8-lane bypass.

Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways In America by David Hackett Fischer (1991). The political/cultural factions in America are, in fact, not random.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Talib (2010). Maybe the most pedantic writer I’ve read, but his take on complexity and the outlier phenomenon releases you as a planner to try and fix every problem at the same time.

Critical Theory Since Plato by Hazard Adams / Leroy Searle (2004). This book is an anthology of essays, organized by era and author. Not particularly easy to access, but good to have on hand to answer the question: “does Heidegger make no sense or is it me?”

Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) / Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961) by Michel Foucault. Bertrand Russell says: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” Foucault mumbles and repeats the last part over and over and over.

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher (2014). I like this book because it does a lot of whimsical, if not downright depressing, speculation. It’s sort of scenario planning for the worst case.

Metamericana by Seth Abramson (2015). This book is the length of some of this guy’s tweet-threads. Metamodernism is what happens when postmodernism folds in on itself; or how to pick up the pieces of the 21st century and put them back together again.

Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism by Robin Van Den Akker / Alison Gibbons / Timotheus Vermeulen (2017). Metamodernism is a perfect organizing principle for trying to makes sense of the world as it stands via the Internet, where everyone has an opinion and most of them are bad.

Modernism by Michael Levinson (2011). The definitive intro to the many substyles of Modern though, which is of course the precursor to postmodern thought, which is of course the precursor to metamodern thought.

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer (2011). Dyer draws his title from a book by Hannah Arendt in 1958. His take is slightly less bleak and more meditative than hers, but the prose is so vital and leads you to seek out so much additional knowledge that this book has to be point zero.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander Et. Al (1977). So much can be said for this 45 year old book whose findings haven’t really changed, because humans are creatures of habit. The interesting thought experiment is to try and distinguish how much the built environment is a cause of behavior, or an effect.

The Politics Of Friendship by Jacques Derrida (1994). Much more than a treatise on being kind to people you like, Derrida, ever the deconstructionist, seems to wedge into the discussion of how the Internet has changed how we live. It’s fascinating.

Rebel Cities by David Harvey (2012). Harvey is the preeminent Marxist scholar, and lots of Marxist thought has been sopped up by philosophers making pivotal arguments about who has the right to what where we live. This is Marxism as Jane Jacobs.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber (2016). No matter how much you believe in free will, there’s something to the idea that people love boundaries, being told what to do. Understanding this will help you frame choices better for good ideas, and will hopefully sift out bad ones.

Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (2008). Every time I meet an experienced planner, I’ll ask her, “where do we start,” because planning and cities are really just one big rubber band ball, and there’s no good place to start. All the work we do as citizens has unlimited consequences, it’s really hard to predict any with certainty, and planning for all is very hard.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delaney (2001). This one is another excellent recommendation from Alex Baca, who reminded us that Times Square is overly sexualized and overly messy, and that it sort of had to be. I’m never going to say that place is inevitable, but sometime in the future, we’ll get a Times Square Is Dead take from someone well meaning who will say that its rise and fall was always going to happen.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte (2018). Appalachia has been branded by outside instigators as the “other America” for generations. In this volume, Catte makes an impassioned argument to rid this notion from your thinking. There’s also a great, reasoned takedown of J.D. Vance and his profiteering disaster porn.

Fiction

There’s a lot of fiction that takes place in cities but isn’t about cities, or the way we think about them. Here’s four that are.

Atlas of Another America: An Architectural Fiction by Keith Krumwiede (2017). You could make an argument that all Utopian writing is fiction and that each subsequent piece is redundant. This one isn’t.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987). The rich have a very different understanding of what a city is—a playground—but that the scrapes are infinitely more troublesome.

Concrete Island by J. G. Ballard (2014). Literally, no exit.

The Municipalists by Seth Fried (2019). Let’s put the nerds in charge of city building and city saving. Sure.

The Last Word.

The New York Coffee Guide by Allegra Strategies (Annual). If the FEMA tracks Waffle House as a proxy for disaster intensity, the North/Pacific Northwest tracks coffee shop openings as a proxy for temporal change (don’t use the word gentrification).