100 Best Urban Planning 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)

Patrick CollisonParticularly great. (Source)

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

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)

Andrew RevkinGreat to see a blog for those designing a decent #anthropocene, drawing on the brimstone energy of "Design With Nature" Ian McHarg. Here he was in action: https://t.co/cssGaxMsM6 Here's my foreword for the related new @McHargCenter @landpolicy book: https://t.co/cJkfAoiZyQ https://t.co/XgU3Xj871c (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)

John KerryI’d start with Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which looked at how pesticide use was harming, and in some cases killing, animals and humans, and really was the first book of its kind to illustrate this environmental destruction. I’ve been so involved in the environment for years and years and that has been a great guideline – it was really the awakening, if you will, to the environmental movement... (Source)

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

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)

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)

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)

Glenn KirschnerI’ve read Mayor Pete’s book. I found it interesting, informative and a good read. Next up for me is Kamala’s book. I’m looking forward to it. I’m interested in everyone’s opinions on candidates’ books you’ve read. https://t.co/EytgBxOiA9 (Source)

Lisa Bloom@Elex_Michaelson @nytimes I think all some pundits know about @PeteButtigieg is that he’s young and gay. The discussions of him on air are brief and inane. I read his powerful book and yes, I am a fan. (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)

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)

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)

Jessica LessinI have major FOMO that I have not had the time to read @ConorDougherty's amazing book about America's housing crisis as told through the Bay Area. Check it out. I have never seen so much positive advanced press for a book. https://t.co/atOg69XxYt (Source)

Scott WienerCongrats @ConorDougherty for writing an awesome book & getting the recognition you deserve! (Source)

Mark MansonThe problem is that modern society requires community engagement to function well. When everyone is just off doing their own thing, a lot of institutions and social necessities begin to fall apart. My own takeaway from this, having studied human happiness for years, is that people rely on a sense of community and shared effort to maintain healthy and stable lives. The fact that people are opting... (Source)

Trevor PhillipsBowling Alone is really important. What Putnam gave us with this book was the idea of social capital. When I was head of the Commission for Racial Equality [now merged into the Equality and Human Rights Commission] I always put it that the two great challenges that face humankind are how we live with the planet and how we live together. Those two collide because climate change is moving vast... (Source)

Audrey RussoQuestion: What books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path? Answer: Anything by Peter Senge. The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz Once you are Lucky, Twice you are good – Sara Lacey Revolutionary Wealth – Alvin Toffler Black Swan – Taleb Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, by Ellen Pao. Creative Class – Richard Florida Creativity Inc. by Ed... (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)

Sarah ChurchwellWish I’d clocked this before my event today on history of America First for @FavershamLit. I’d most def have shouted out to the great man, & let’s add Black Reconstruction in America as a book that rewrote US history, tho white America refused to see it for half a century. https://t.co/z332g57G4Q (Source)

Jeremy TillHungry City shows how architects are far more enmeshed in the world around them than they themselves would like to believe. (Source)

Richard ReynoldsCarolyn Steel carries on the theme of how we use land. She deals with the very current concern that cities today are not sustainable because the hinterlands from which they are fed are running out. The trail that food has to take is enormous and also not sustainable. What Carolyn Steel does is give a fascinating historical perspective. You realise that these problems are nothing new. For example... (Source)