CityReads│The 100 "Best" Books on City-Making Ever Written
After looking over his extensive library of books on urbanism, Brent Toderian selects the 100 best books on city-making that he's collected and read over the years.
Source：http://www.planetizen.com/node/66462
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Brent Toderian is an international consultant on advanced urbanism with TODERIAN UrbanWORKS, Vancouver’s former Director of City Planning, and the President of the Council for Canadian Urbanism. However, he seems more like titles like bibliophile. So after looking over his extensive library of books on urbanism, Brent Toderian selects the 100 best books on city-making that he's collected and read over the years.
Many of the books are possibly not in print anymore, but are worth keeping an eye out for, particularly in used bookstores (Such as Camillo Sitte's "The Art of Building Cities" (1945) and Charles Mulford Robinson's "Modern Civic Art, or The City Made Beautiful" (1909)). But don't worry, if you don't love the classics like he do, he’ve bolded the relatively newer books in the list, to help you focus on more recent publications. And he also has italicized the books that he think were written to be particularly readable and entertaining to the non city-making professional
Some books on this list he actually disagree with, but he still enjoyed reading them because they made him think or challenged his assumptions. (Such as those written by Le Corbusier & Frank Lloyd Wright).
So here we go, from last to first
In addition to the 100 professional or pseudo-professional books above, he also added a few honourable mentions:
* Oh, the Places You'll Go! – Dr. Seuss (That's right! Dr. Seuss understood placemaking!)
* The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
* The City and the City – China Mieville
* Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
* The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson
* The Tipping Point, & Blink – both by Malcolm Gladwell
After much discussion and debate from his tweets and emails, the author gave us a few additional thoughts on the Top 100:
He agreed that three books should probably have been moved up on the list:
* Duany/Plater-Zyberk/Speck’s Suburban Nation,
* Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere
* McHarg’s Design With Nature.
And he would also add four books to the list that were definite oversights
* Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities, which in some ways influenced me more than the included Cities and The Wealth of Nations;
* Douglas Kelbaugh’s Common Place: Toward Neighborhood & Regional Design;
* Leon Krier’s The Architecture of Communities; and
* Randall Arendt’s Rural by Design (urbanism isn’t just for cities…).