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Best City Reads in 2017

Planetizen releases its list of the best books published in 2017 on the subjects of planning, design, and development.

Josh Stephens, James Brasuell, Planetizen's Top Ten Books of 2017

Source: https://www.planetizen.com/features/96041-planetizens-top-ten-books-2017

Planetizen releases its list of the best books published in 2017 on the subjects of planning, design, and development.

1 Atlas Obscura

Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

Workman Publishing Company

September 20, 2017, 480 pages

Based on the popular blog of the same name, Atlas Obscura features places that no urban planer would ever design. And that's the point. The precision and rationality of planning—not to mention the bureaucracy—is no match for Slab City (California), The Cathedral of Junk (Austin, Tex.), Stiltsville (Miami), and Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Garden (S. Carolina). Atlas Obscura is a global romp, though both cities and non-cities, identifying the weird, offbeat, and unexpected features of the built environment, from castles to museums to archeological sites and natural wonders. It is an unapologetically joyous project.

2 Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling

Carlton Reid

Island Press

June 15, 2017, 246 Pages

Rumors of an all-powerful bike lobby waging an unrelenting war on cars have haunted mainstream media's editorial pages and local government comment periods for years now. In reality, bike advocates have made only incremental progress in the pursuit of spatial justice, though there are a few stories of giant leaps of progress made for bikes and bike kind to choose from in the annals of global history. It's the project of Carlton Reid with his newest book, Bike Boom, to share lessons from the ongoing history of bike advocacy, and bike opposition, around the world.

Reid examines case studies from England, the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, and several locations in the United States. The U.S. stops include Davis, California, which the book describes as the "Bicycle Capital of America." The big ticket item with Bike Boom is the story of the unprecedented boom in cycling's popularity that took place in the United States and the United Kingdom in the first half of the 1970s. Bike Boom offers a historical record to inspire and inform the contemporary wave of bike enthusiasm—that it might persist a little longer this time around.

3 The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein

Liveright

May 2, 2017, 368 pages

Urban planners do not necessarily bear the greatest responsibility for America's fervor for segregation. In fact, Rothstein rarely, if ever, refers to them directly. But they surely bear some of it. That's because, right up to the 1960s, cities, suburbs, and financial institutions across the United States employed every legal and quasi-legal means possible to keep whites and blacks as segregated as if they were living on different continents. This of course includes zoning. It was, in fact, the raison d’être of many towns.

We're all abstractly familiar with the practices of redlining, discriminatory lending, and so forth, but those buzzwords are just the beginning. As Rothstein lays out, segregation was a decentralized but deliberate, de facto effort that involved governments, courts, the real estate industry, and everyday citizens alike. The effects—on African-Americans individually and on our cities and society generally—were and are devastating.

Rothstein's book is important, but it's still flawed. Some chapters are cursory. He relies too much on isolated anecdotes, and not enough on data, to make assertions about nationwide trends. But the point should be well taken by planners: whatever role they played in writing discriminatory zoning laws and helping banks cordon off neighbors, contemporary planners—and all compassionate Americans—should dedicate themselves to righting the wrongs that Rothstein ably chronicles.

4 Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

Lauren Elkin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

February 28, 2017, 336 pages  

English being a mostly non-gendered language, we tend not to think of "walking" and "walkers" as male, female, or otherwise. But French is another matter, and it was the French who turned walking from a utilitarian mode of transportation to an activity in its own right. Charles Baudeliaire popularized the delights of strolling around Paris, and successors like Walter Benjamin (a German) followed his lead. They were all flaneurs—masculine. Until now.

If ever there were an un-gendered activity, you'd think it would be walking. But, this being the real world, it's just not so. Lauren Elkin's Flâneuse is a pointed yet joyous attempt to claim the art of urban walking for the female gender. She is very much a writer, drawing on artists and scholars ranging from Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Sofia Coppola, and Joan Didion to illustrate her first-person accounts of strolling through, respectively, Paris, London, Paris again, Tokyo, and New York—each of which get their own chapter. In the broad sweep of Flâneuse, she makes it abundantly clear that women deserve welcoming sidewalks and intricate streetscapes just as much as men do.

5 Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere In Between

Darran Anderson

The University of Chicago Press

April 6, 2017, 576 Pages

Imaginary Cities is rare for the connections it builds between an incredible variety of disciplines. Each chapter weaves a kind of prose poem that travels from each corner of the world and through every epoch of history. One chapter's aside is the next chapter's protagonist, as Anderson exposes the wildest fantasies of historic figures as varied as Marco Polo, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Le Corbusier. In each corner of this tale, we find impossible mirror versions of cities, and lessons they reveal about the people and the world that dreamed them up.

6 The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It

Richard Florida

Basic Books

April 11, 2017, 336 pages

In the New Urban Crisis, Florida finally acknowledged a trend that most people wish was far less popular—inequity within cities and among cities. Florida focuses on the "superstar cities" that have made it big, and on the rest, which have been left behind. And he acknowledges that economic success for many city-dwellers—the proverbial hipsters and one-percenters—has been countered by housing shortages, blight, and crushing costs of living for many of their neighbors.

Florida defines these intra-urban problems as inequality, segregation, and sorting. He offers a slew of data to describe these patterns, some of it almost comical in its precision. He offers data sets to rank cities according to different types of segregation: Segregation of the Wealthy; Segregation of the Less Educated; Segregation of College Grads; Educational Segregation; Creative Class Segregation; Service Class Segregation, etc.

7 No Small Plans

Gabrielle Lyon, Devin Mawdsley, Kayce Bayer, Chris Lin, Deon Reed

Chicago Architecture Foundation

July 2017, 144 pages

The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) produced and published No Small Plans as an ambitious and successful experiment in civic engagement. In partnership with Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Public Library, CAF aspires to distribute 30,000 copies of No Small Plans for free to Chicago teens in the next three years, funded with the aid of a Kickstarter campaign and every purchase of the book.

No Small Plans is a graphic novel that aims to become a new version of the 1911 textbook called Wacker's Manual, which explained the concepts and goals of the 1909 Plan of Chicago to a previous generation. In No Small Plans, three generations of Chicago teens, living in the past, present, and future, navigate Chicago and describe how the city encourages or discourages their dreams and ambitions. Following each chapter, an interlude features Daniel Burnham, the force behind the 1909 Plan of Chicago and the origin of the famous quote that gives the graphic novel its name.

No Small Plans is more than just a worthy cause—more so it's a thoughtfully executed experiment in engagement with younger generations that might not be familiar with the practices of planning. The stories are readable and accessible, with a diverse cast of characters that reflect their audience. The characters also make their most of their opportunity to celebrate and ponder the city. Here's hoping the Chicago youth who read No Small Plans will find their own unique voice in doing the same.

8 Suburb: Planning Politics and the Public Interest

Royce Hanson

Cornell University Press

June 6, 2017, 329 pages

Suburb provides a detailed and deeply researched history of planning, suburban planning, no less, and still manages to be engaging and essential. Throughout the book, Royce Hanson gives careful and non-judgmental treatment to concepts of suburban life that would otherwise take years of careful study to encounter and understand. It's easy to imagine this book as a textbook that sets foundational understanding of the politics and history of suburban planning.

9 The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

Jeff Goodell

Little, Brown and Company

October 24, 2017, 352 pages

sea-level rise is no joke. It's also no secret that we are headed for catastrophes of monumental proportions. Goodell covers the latest science of sea level rise and discusses its potential impacts on low-lying places, including Miami, Venice, the Marshall Islands, New York City, Norfolk, and Lagos, among others. His prose is fun and lively—sometimes too lively—and his message clear: cities must prepare with as much enthusiasm as possible.

10 Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change

Ashley Dawson

Verso

October 17, 2017, 384 pages

For author Ashley Dawson, the development of coastal cities is an example of capitalism at its most reckless, and the failure of governments to mitigate and prepare for sea level rise exemplifies public policy as its most lethargic. Dawson focuses on his native New York City, where he is a professor at CCNY, and points to the degradation of Jamaica Bay and (like Goodell) the cautionary tale of Superstorm Sandy. Unapologetically left-wing, Dawson does not trust the corporate classes in the least and refers to "climate apartheid" to describe the inevitable uneven impacts of climate change. Unlike Goodell, Dawson directly enlists planners, writing in his conclusion, "socially just planning needs to be articulated."  

11 Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

Steven Johnson

Riverhead Books

November 15, 2016, 336 pages

The premise of Wonderland is that delight, distraction, entertainment, and play are far more responsible for the modern world than anyone recognizes, historians included. Steven Johnson asks the question of why big changes happen in society, and repeatedly finds answers that do not reflect pragmatic concerns. From this line of thinking, Johnson traces a narrative that begins with the color or Roman cloaks, through the original commercial district in London, to the mall creations and failed socialist ambitions of Victor Gruen, to name dropping Jane Jacobs and Buckminster Fuller while examining Walt Disney's never-built vision for EPCOT. Johnson is a master storyteller, worthy of these delightful stories, and you'll likely enjoy reading this book as much as Johnson clearly enjoyed writing it.

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