100 Best Cities Books of All Time

Edward GlaeserJacobs pointed out innumerable ways in which people are connected by proximity and the virtues of dense living. (Source)

Leo HollisThis book sums up these new ideas of putting people first – that the city is complex but not a place that needs to be rationalised. (Source)

Barack ObamaHe may have the country’s finest experts at his fingertips, but it still doesn’t hurt to read up on environmental and economic issues. (Source)

Ryan HolidayIt took me 15 days to read all 1,165 pages of this monstrosity that chronicles the rise of Robert Moses. I was 20 years old. It was one of the most magnificent books I’ve ever read. Moses built just about every other major modern construction project in New York City. The public couldn’t stop him, the mayor couldn’t stop him, the governor couldn’t stop him, and only once could the President of... (Source)

Ben GreenmanWell, if you look at a picture of a place, you can normally get a sense of what it’s like. But hopefully what books do, or what thinking does, is to show you what that place is like underneath. The Power Broker is the definitive history of how, in modern America, cities get built, power gets thrown around, neighbourhoods are overpowered by developers and politicians. It’s gigantic and it’s a... (Source)

Bill GatesIf you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book about the eviction crisis in Milwaukee. Desmond has written a brilliant portrait of Americans living in poverty. He gave me a better sense of what it is like to be poor in this country than anything else I have read. (Source)

Satya NadellaNadella is using this season to learn more in a variety of subjects. By the looks of it, he is interested in, among other things, virtual reality, the refugee crisis, and housing for the urban poor. (Source)

Noah KaganSurprising insights into the lives of people who were evicted. I make a lot of assumptions about these people. Turns out I was wrong WHY they get evicted. (Source)

Colin ThubronOh God. Well, officially it’s Marco Polo describing the cities of his travels to Kublai Khan. It’s been opined that every city he describes is a version of Venice, but I think that doesn’t really work. They seem to me to be marvellous imaginative fantasies, which sometimes reproduce states of mind. There are 40 or so cities described, all entirely imaginary I think, and that’s what’s so magical... (Source)

James MeekIt has different layers. The set-up is that Kublai Khan has conquered this vast empire; an empire so large that he, sitting at the centre of it, cannot know all the many parts of it. He can’t visit them, he can’t see them, and if he goes to one part all the other parts have changed. So he sits there at the centre of his empire and Marco Polo travels around and visits the various cities and comes... (Source)

Melissa Jacobs@Turk0219 Agree, that book was amazing! (Source)

Barack ObamaFact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads (Source)

Bill GatesKatherine Boo spent three years getting to know the people of Annawadi, a slum of about 3,000 people on the edge of a sewage-filled lake in India’s largest city. Her book is a poignant reminder of how much more work needs to be done to address the inequities in the world. But it’s also an uplifting story of people striving to make a life for themselves, sacrificing for their families, and in... (Source)

Adam MinterVivid scenes of walking down Mumbai’s Airport Road, lined by shacks and trash pickers, and behind them are walls, and behind them are the finest five star hotels in India. (Source)

Patrick CollisonParticularly great. (Source)

Liz Lambert[The author] is a writer and a thinker about architecture and about how we build. (Source)

Jeremy TillWhen I first arrived in Los Angles, before I read the book, I was completely and utterly bamboozled by the place. I was just thinking what the hell is going on here? (Source)

Dennis McDougalDavis built on the history and arguments that Carey McWilliams proffered in An Island on the Land half a century earlier. City of Quartz, which was actually a PhD dissertation that he turned into book form, looks at all of Southern California’s issues, including water, and weaves them together into a road map for the 21st century, with lots of warning signs along the way. He was wary of air... (Source)

Jeremy TillStuart Brand is a person who thinks clearly about our future, and therefore is in a good position to comment on the future life of architecture. (Source)

Alison WolfI think everyone has heard of The Death and Life of American Cities, which changed the way we think about cities. Through that book she stopped, not single-handedly of course, the destruction of inner-city neighbourhoods by driving great highways through them. But she was also an extraordinary woman in a whole range of ways: she had very little conventional academic background, she thought for... (Source)

Seth MnookinThe Ghost Map is a book that I oftentimes give to people to show them how cool and exciting and accessible and gripping stories about scientific discoveries can be. (Source)

Alison AlvarezI read the Ghost Map, a book about 1854 London Cholera outbreak. The outbreak was stopped because of a map created by Dr. John Snow. You can see hints of this map in some of our customer discovery tools because it was such an effective way of pinpointing a solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem. (Source)

Stephen EvansJohnson looks at London during a specific moment in time, August 1854, and focuses on a particular incident, an outbreak of cholera in Soho, in Central London. (Source)

Ben GreenmanBecause I’m a writer, I think this is a very important city for writers—and because I work at the New Yorker, I think it’s a very important city for certain kinds of writers. This book was part of a travel series, for which they had reporters and editors try to corral writers and have them talk about their travel. They might take Paul Bowles to northern Africa, for instance, and he’d guide them... (Source)

Edward GlaeserNature’s Metropolis tells the story of Chicago’s relationship with the great American hinterland. It certainly shaped my understanding of the role that cities played in the 19th century. William Cronon tells this story through a series of commodities, from the timber of the early forest that came down through Lake Michigan, to the corn of Iowa that produced the pigs that were slaughtered in... (Source)

Bradley VoytekThere’s a phrase I once heard, ‘every story has one buy.’ There’s one totally ridiculous thing that readers have to buy into. The author doesn’t usually get more than one buy, and their story and their world have to be internally consistent with that one ridiculous thing. In The City & the City there is a supernatural force that comes in and yanks people out of reality if they break the rules of... (Source)

Amelia BooneRemains one my favorites to this day. (Source)

Antonio VillaraigosaAs mayor of a large metropolis, the living conditions of our residents are always present in my mind. Every decision I make, I try to evaluate if it will help improve the quality of life of every Angeleno. But Dickens really dissects both the aristocrats and the revolutionaries, to show that change is never easy. As progressives, we value government’s role and power to improve our cities and... (Source)

May WitwitI started a paper about the historical reality in this book. And as I studied it more deeply I got depressed because the things that were happening were similar to Iraq. How the mob could be turned against people by devious minds. They just killed people without even knowing them. The people who were killed were probably very good people, you never know. You just can’t kill haphazardly, heads... (Source)

David DownieThat is a book I read when I was young – in my teens – and it really marked me. (Source)

Roman KrznaricOrwell is one of my great empathic heroes. He went tramping in east London, trying to empathise with people who lived on the social margins. (Source)

David KramaleyI really enjoyed Down and Out in Paris and London. I think it’s meant to be a semi-autobiographical novel by George Orwell. I liked it because it was one of those books that had a big influence on the way I perceive and think about the world. Highly recommended. (Source)

Rogue EpaTucking into a great new book in my happy place. @GilbertLiz https://t.co/Qoz8tO4OVp (Source)

Sarah LahbatiCity of Girls may be my new favorite book. (Source)

Alom ShahaPost-apocalyptic, character driven, novel with anti-nuclear themes about an underground world where electricity is an incredibly rare resource. (Source)

Bill WaltonSam Anderson is a visionary artist who sees what others can’t; he’s a master wordsmith who creates beauty and light from confusion and plunging darkness; he's our tour guide to a better tomorrow because he understands a complex and foundational history that is our launching pad to new and unexplored universes. (Source)

Diane CoyleThis is about what social scientists call ‘social capital’, so the social assets or strengths that any community has to draw on in delivering economic improvements or quality of life etc. It’s about libraries in particular, but also other social infrastructure that enables people to meet and understand each other and have safe and inviting ways to help each other. He talks about how these are... (Source)

Ghanem NuseibehBrilliant! If you want to read about Jerusalem’s history, it’s Simon’s book! https://t.co/vHyCpMu0eh (Source)

Britni Danielle.@byshondaland announced its first @Netflix projects, including "The Warmth of Other Suns" a series based on Isabel Wilkerson's book about the Great Migration, and a documentary on @msdebbieallen's 'Hot Chocolate Nutcracker." Full slate: https://t.co/rLCk65Mmyj (Source)

Marvin LiaoI tend to jump from book to book and may switch if I am interested in some new topic. This is a pleasure for me (which I also do benefit work wise from too). It’s quite a random list because I have eclectic interests (or just scatterbrained most likely) on tech business, AI, general global economy, geopolitics, rising Biotech economy & history. I'm basically 15% to 50% into all these books. (Source)

Venkatesh RaoScott’s book is very important for anybody who wants to have an understanding of how complex modern societies work, why things seem to fail predictably, and what you can do about them, to a limited extent. (Source)

Clare LockhartSeeing Like A State. He’s quite similar to Dewey in a way. He also sees the state as only a mechanism. But he thinks that the way that the state chooses to count, or the way it chooses to see, will inform how it behaves and what kind of animal it becomes. Scott explains, for example, how in France, in early modern times, the state decided to count two things. It decided to count how much salt... (Source)

Vinod KhoslaThe physics behind biology, cities, economics and companies. Do they grow, scale and die by the same math equations? New insights that are enlightening and delightful. (Source)

Mark ZuckerbergI'm still working my way through The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which is an amazing book so far — about how violence has declined throughout history due to effective governance, the growth of commerce and the spread of ideas. I see a lot of Facebook's work in these themes. The more we all have a voice to share our perspectives, the more empathy we have for each other... (Source)

Gabriel CoarnaSudhir Venkatesh's "Gangleader For A Day" significantly adjusted how I think about a bunch of stuff: poverty, economics, society, etc. (Source)

Andy BeckettI’m very interested in Los Angeles, my favourite city apart from London. I’ve been there many times and find it fascinating that it was the fashionable urban prototype of the late 60s. Banham’s book epitomises that and helped create the idea. It’s about the new consumerism and whether it can be accommodated within a society that is still relatively just. He’s not a Thatcherite. He may like people... (Source)

Michael LoppA fascinating read about when bridges were still in beta. (Source)

Brent GlassEven though you know what the ending is, he creates a dramatic sense of just what it took to bring this bridge into being and to complete it. (Source)

John R Stanton@grisuy @anthoknees The snot boogy story is also based on something that really happened as I recall. If you haven’t read @AoDespair’s book Homicide, you should. It’s amazing and has a lot of the source material from the Wire and Homicide the show. (Source)

John GreenThis harrowing, compulsively readable, and carefully researched book lays out in clear-eyed detail what Earth's changing climate means for us today, and what it will mean for future generations... It's a thriller in which the hero in peril is us (Source)

Elizabeth KolbertJeff Goodell has taken on some of the most important issues of our time, from coal mining to geoengineering. In The Water Will Come, he explains the threat of sea level rise with characteristic rigor and intelligence. The result is at once deeply persuasive and deeply unsettling. (Source)

Alex BlumbergJust unbelievably fantastic. (Source)

Ben GreenmanWell, I think when people come into New York, if they’ve never been here before, they think of all the possible dangers—purse snatchings and peep shows, that sort of thing—and that’s part of the appeal. In any giant city that has this many people so close together, those things are going to happen. White’s mission was to go out and make sense of all of it. It’s an extremely engaged, really fun... (Source)

Mohsin HamidWe think of Hemingway as an American writer, but much of his writing is set outside of the United States, just as much of his life was set outside of the United States. (Source)

Janine di GiovanniThe fact that Hemingway writes it as an old, rather bitter man trapped in his Idaho home with a bullying wife while he dreams of his youth in Paris with his first wife and child is so touching to me. (Source)

Wai Chee DimockThis is a memoir by Hemingway about his time in Paris, which includes sketches of people like F Scott Fitzgerald. (Source)

Nicola SturgeonA post #SNP19 book recommendation - this by @rebeccamakkai is brilliant. Set in mid 1980s Chicago and modern day Paris, it’s a very moving story about the devastation of the AIDS crisis. https://t.co/8pzDEdwrhx (Source)