Here's what you should read if you want to think about urbanism like me
My list of books for your curiosity
I own about 1000 books.
My methods for collecting books follow the master of semiotics, Umberto Eco’s, screed to build an antilibrary: filling my space with as many books as I can that do nothing but beg me to read them.
What’s the point of this? Well, Nassim Nicolas Taleb says:
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.
The value in having thousands of books is not having read all of them, but having access to the knowledge of them whenever you need. There’s a comfort in that. Books are maybe the only thing that can hug you and also give you a paper cut.
By profession, I’m trained as an urban planner and a lot of planning knowledge comes from these books and articles, discovered, written, repeated and reinforced over the last few centuries. Like any good profession, there’s a spectrum of competing ideas for how how we build and maintain our cities, and for who?
I’m going to go through some of the books that I’ve read (and some that I haven’t) if you want to think about urbanism and cities the way I do. This post is inspired by one from a good pal of mine, Alex Baca, and some of my choices will mirror hers. But she and I also veer in different directions because we’re different people. That said I have her to thank for a lot of the way I think.
I’ll include links to buy these books (I don’t get anything from this, I’m just trying to make your life easier), and they’re to Amazon, but if you can afford to spend a few dollars more at your local shop…
The Core Four
If I were ever to teach a class on urbanism these four would be the books I would assign.
City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age by Richard Schragger (2016)
If there’s one book, a single piece of critical analysis of how cities work and how players are incentivized to destroy each other in the tumble to the cheapest, it’s City Power. You can stop here if you’re short on time. But read it twice. If you’ve ever wondered why Amazon got 286 applications for HQ2, but curiously chose New York and DC, this book has the answers you need.
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air by Marshall Berman (1988)
Here’s the rub with this one. Humans have this innate, probably biological, desire to build, seemingly no matter what. I’m not going to explicitly say, right here, that the answer is the curse and blessing of gloabalized capitalism. This book asks you to frame how you think through the eyes of Goethe’s Dr. Faustus as if he were a Soviet staring down the Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersberg. Also, one of the all time dunks on Robert Moses. If you want to know why we can’t figure out infrastructure (or housing, or schools) in the US, read this.
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Suleiman Osman (2011)
Osman’s book is so rich with detail and convincing arguments that everything you thought you knew about gentrification is likely based on a false narrative that you, yourself, created. Daniel Kay Hertz sums it up nicely, here: “And this is where, finally, we get to what it means to love people but hate the public.” (This is not unlike K’s quote from Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”) Osman’s book, if you read it closely enough, will hopefully strip away any idealism you have left about who’s right and who’s wrong when talking about housing, planning’s stickiest subject.
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee (1997)
Here’s where Alex and I differ; I just think communications theory is higher up on my list of things planners and people who talk about cities out loud should focus on. Because here’s the thing: no one cares about who’s right or not, and no one cares about your data. Both of those matter very little if you’re unable to craft a narrative that carries the full weight of your convictions. Learn the principles to tell a story to your audience and your practice will fall in line. McKee’s book is the great hack. Don’t worry that it’s for screenwriters.
The Rest
Here’s 100+ more books that I love, sort of grouped together.
I tried to order these how I would first describe them. There’s lots of crossover. Some of these are more relevant than others, but there’s a short blurb next to each so you can decide for yourself.
The Unicorn
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961). This is the first book about cities that I read, before I even knew what city planning was or that you could do it as a profession. Jacobs was a fantastic chronicler about the present vibrancy of urban spaces, if not a little stuck in time and Pollyannaish about the future. Does anyone think she’d be in favor of a massive upzoning in her beloved Greenwich Village?
Design
These books are a mix of urban design—the physical layout of buildings and infrastructure—and of landscape architecture—how we design with and without nature.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski (2000). Professor Rybczynski pens the definitive biography of the venerated Olmsted. It’s a history, but it’s a Malkovich into the mind of one of the best, so it stays here.
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold (1949). Thoreau, but later. Nature writing while there was still nature, but just.
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus (1997). Ever wonder why Japanese bullet trains can rumble so fast?
Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas W. Tallamy (2007). Want to learn how to talk trees with your parks commish? Want her to take you seriously when you need something?
Design With Nature by Ian McHarg (1969). Urban planning has no analogue to landscape architecture’s McHarg. So overwhelmingly influential, his book—now 50 years old—retains its vitality against almost every new idea.
Helvetica And The New York City Subway System by Paul Shaw (2011). The story of how NYC standardized its signage as it consolidated into a single system to codify that the system was a cohesive unit for use by all New Yorkers. Design matters.
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv (2005). The title is a little pretentious but the message is crystal clear: how can we design spaces to encourage kids to play outside?
Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space (1971) / Cities For People (2010) by Jan Gehl. Gehl’s books—written 40 years apart—ask the simple question, “If cities aren’t for people, who are they for?” Read both to find out.
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas by Rebecca Solnit / Joshua Jelly-Shapiro (2016). This is a fantastic and fantastical book of maps. Usually, planners use maps to tell stories about information; sometimes planners use them to sketch out entire neighborhoods. Solnti and Jelly-Shapiro instead use maps to tell stories about people and about the latent history of New York City. Because place matters, too, Solnit’s also done a similar treatment of New Orleans and San Francisco.
Planning and Design for Future Informal Settlements: Shaping the Self-Constructed City by David Gouverneur (2014). Often, when we talk about design, we’re talking western and northern hemispheres, where the layouts of cities follow the structure, order, and design of a western education and philosophy. Here, we learn about the other “side” of the world and how those principles are the same, or totally different.
The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design by Anne Whiston Spirn (1985). Professor Spirn, whose book put in sharp relief the environment against contemporary design practices. Thirty-five years later, the problems are ongoing, and they’re much, much more pressing. Start here for a great primer.
The Image Of The City (1960) / Site Planning (with Gary Hack) (1962) by Kevin Lynch. There’s a Kevin Lynch Award at MIT given out to honor those who further Lynch’s research, which focuses on observation and place. In site design, all roads lead to Lynch.
The Organization Man (1956) / The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces (1980) William "Holly" White. I wrestled whether to include White’s work in the politics or design section. These books are about the design of daily life, which is inherently political, but I don’t think the other way around.
The Politics Of Design by Ruben Pater (2016). Meaning is never totally neutral and your design choices matter, font by font, color by color. Pater says as much in 32 slim pages, but each one seems super vital. The takeaways here are as important as the information in plans themselves.
Politics and Policy
This is the biggest glut of books of the ones I recommend. They tend to cover how politics works, and especially how it works in place, whether it’s a specific region of the U.S. (where I live) or the world (where I also live). I’m obsessed with power, who has it and who it’s used against for gain, so that’s the bent I’d like you to take when reading below.
48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene (1998). You think the idea that you had, and the policy precedent and data you have to support this idea is robust enough to make anyone care?
722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York by Clifton Hood (2004). The definitive history of how NYC’s Subway was built and its spillover effects. Much more than cut-and-cover, this is a political tale, with an addendum from Philip Plotch, below.
A Burglar's Guide To The City by Geoff Manaugh (2016). This is an important policy book, not just a fun read, because Manaugh and his cadre of stories reflect blind spots lots of policymakers have when making decisions. Becoming aware that these blind spots are possible, that they’re there, and that you have them is step one to smart decision making.
American Babylon by Robert O. Self (2003). This is about postwar Oakland, but it’s about your hometown, too, if you look at it from this angle. Self manages to weave many political narratives together that you’ll need to use your systems brain for.
Anti-Intellectualism In American Life by Richard Hofstadter (1963). If you think Trump’s getting elected was a surprise, Hofstadter would like a word with you.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky (2017). If you think your boss was probably born an asshole, you’re probably right. Dig in to find out why.
Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 by Dolores Hayden (2003). If you think the suburbs were inevitable, you’re probably right. If you think we can do anything about it, I’ll let Professor Hayden make her case. Spoilers: the “suburbs” don’t pick winners. It’s not blind justice.
Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers by Jason Barr (2016). Manhattan’s skyline is iconic—and it has been for almost 90 years. Read this to learn why it wasn’t geological.
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth Jackson (1985). Though written earlier, Jackson’s book is the spiritual successor to Building Suburbia. They’re a binary pair and should both be read. Remember blindspots?
Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau (1992). I love reading books that were written way before the academic narrative (and the development) caught up. Edge City is one of them.
Empire On The Hudson by Jameson W. Doig (2002). Do you know why the Port Authority exists? Or what an “authority” does differently than a commission, or a department? Want to have this conversation with your boss’s boss, who just hired you to be the liaison? No?
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (2016). It’s very hard to write about ethnography, and it’s especially difficult to craft a narrative about housing ethnography that doesn’t read academic or drown in statistics. Desmond crafts just this narrative that’s equal parts informative and sad.
From Despair to Hope: Hope VI and the New Promise of Public Housing in America's Cities edited by Henry G. Cisneros & Lora Engdahl (2009). A detailed look at the HOPE VI program via this collection of essays and policy breakdowns. It’s a compendium and a policy briefing packet, and it’s the best one there is.
Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty (2020). There’s a few books on here written by Times’ journalists, and there’s a few books on here that center on the Bay Area, and there’s a few books on here that focus on housing, but this is the only one the covers all three. Plus it’s easy to read.
Great Planning Disasters by Peter Hall (1982). Sir Peter Hall’s diagnosis-manual is a series of cases followed by a suite of analysis. The studies are a little dated, but their takeaways will always hold weight. Calling these projects “disasters,” is a little heady, though. For a more technical, modern analysis of a “disaster,” check out Greiman’s analysis of The Big Dig.
Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery (2013). Is happiness bullshit?
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte (2018). Please don’t take J.D. Vance seriously; his book got lots of things wrong about Appalachia.
How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall (2001). Here’s another one about suburbs, but how the politics of space defined an entire generation. If you read Hayden and Jackson and think you understand the suburbs, you absolutely don’t. Let Marshall tell you why.
How The States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein (2008). Or, watch the TV show. Just remember, if you think your shape if shaped funny, remember they could be shaped funnier.
If Venice Dies by Salvatore Settis (2016). In a city of 250,000 people and over 25,000,000 visitors each year, art critic Settis asks, “can we sustain this?” Is any tourist attraction sustainable over time? Why Venice?
Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch (2009). Violence has always been part of housing because land is the one thing we can’t just make more of. Especially valuable land in one of America’s jewel cities. And because it’s America, especially if you’re not white. Who gets to stay alive? It’s not a simple answer. Hirsch chronicles the political violence here around housing projects that popped up, some of which are still standing.
Moving Minds by Paul M. Weynrich / William S. Lind (2009). One of America’s great myths is that transit is a coastal, liberal fantasy. But in order to make the case to people who don’t agree with you, you have to learn to speak their language. This is one handbook on how to do so. (There are many, many more arguments).
Names On The Land by George R. Stewart (1945). Originally published on the heels of World War II, Stewart makes the same argument as Ruben Pater, but instead of design he focuses on nomenclature. The origins of what something is called often intersects with its use, who it’s for, and how you, dear planner, should often leave it alone.
Neighborhood Defenders by Katherine Levine Einstein / David M. Glick / Maxwell Palmer (2019). Planners who fully trust big billion-dollar government programs, like HOPE VI or Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), likely are unfamiliar with the roadblocks that are two-person neighborhood steering committees. For better or worse you’ve got to take these groups seriously.
Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud (2018). If you’ve noticed, I haven’t (and won’t) include books that talk about “new urbanism” and “smart growth,” because while I think the ideas they enumerate are mostly good, the movement is mostly bullshit. Bertaud’s book says just this, in about 150,000 more words and a few maps, too.
Other People's Money by Charles V. Bagli (2013). Ever wondered why rich people make so much money? It certainly isn’t because they’re that much smarter than the rest of us. It’s because they have access to unlimited money. Here’s the story of how these very rich people made a bad bet and lost nothing.
Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making by Deborah Stone (2011). This book is the bridge between the “city” of policy and the “city” of politics. The third edition is unreasonably expensive; you can find a cheaper version of older editions, for sure.
Politics Across the Hudson: The Tappan Zee Megaproject by Philip Mark Plotch (2018). Ever wonder why the Tappan Zee bridge crosses at the widest part of the Hudson? Or why there isn’t a train across the river, or why there isn’t another bridge?