CityReads│16 Books Authored by Female Urban Scholars

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16 Books Authored by Female Urban Scholars

Read to learn about the contributions by female urban scholars.

Alissa Walker, 25 must-read books about cities written by women.

Source:https://www.curbed.com/2019/3/8/18256644/best-books-cities-urbanism-women

Nearly all of books about cities are written by men. It is essential that we should also read and hear voice from women. Here is a list of books authored by female urban scholars based on what Alissa Walker compiled for curbed.com. It is not meant to be a definitive or complete list of the contributions of women urbanists, but a collection of essential perspectives on topics where women have much to contribute.

1 Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht

Drawing on historical and contemporary examples as well as case study research and archival data from five cities―Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle, this book discusses the characteristics of sidewalks as small urban public spaces, and such related issues as the ambiguous boundaries of their “public” status, contestation over specific uses, control and regulations, and the implications for First Amendment speech and assembly rights.

2 The Just City by Susan S. Fainstein

In the first half of The Just City, Fainstein draws on the work of John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and others to develop an approach to justice relevant to twenty-first-century cities, one that incorporates three central concepts: diversity, democracy, and equity. In the book's second half, Fainstein tests her ideas through case studies of New York, London, and Amsterdam by evaluating their postwar programs for housing and development in relation to the three norms. She concludes by identifying a set of specific criteria for urban planners and policymakers to consider when developing programs to assure greater justice in both the process of their formulation and their effects.

3 Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities by Mindy Thompson Fullilove

What if divided neighborhoods were causing public health problems? What if a new approach to planning and design could tackle both the built environment and collective well-being at the same time? What if cities could help each other? Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove uses her unique perspective as a public health psychiatrist to explore and identify ways of healing social and spatial fractures simultaneously. Using urban restoration projects from France and the US as exemplary cases, Fullilove identifies nine tools that can mend our broken cities and reconnect our communities to make them whole.

4 Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work and Family Life by Dolores Hayden

Americans still build millions of dream houses in neighborhoods that sustain Victorian stereotypes of the home as 'woman's place' and the city as 'man's world.' Urban historian and architect Dolores Hayden tallies the personal and social costs of an American 'architecture of gender' for the two-earner family, the single-parent family, and single people. Hayden traces three models of home in historical perspective―the haven strategy in the United States, the industrial strategy in the former USSR, and the neighborhood strategy in European social democracies―to document alternative ways to reconstruct neighborhoods

5 Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City by Amanda Kolson Hurley

The history of suburbia is surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially-conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these, such as the co-housing commune of Old Economy, Pennsylvania; a tiny-house anarchist community in Piscataway, New Jersey; a government-planned garden city in Greenbelt, Maryland; a racially integrated subdivision (before the Fair Housing Act) in Trevose, Pennsylvania; experimental Modernist enclaves in Lexington, Massachusetts; and the mixed-use, architecturally daring Reston, Virginia.

6 The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, provided an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities. 

7 Sex and the Revitalized City: Gender, Condominium Development, and Urban Citizenship by Leslie Kahn

Young, single women emerged in the late 1990s as powerful consumers in the wave of real estate development that was reshaping the landscape of cities. Reports claimed that condominium ownership offered women new-found freedom, financial independence, and personal security. But has home ownership truly empowered women?

To get at the reality behind the rhetoric, Sex and the Revitalized City explores the phenomenon from the perspective of planners, developers, and women condo owners to reveal that women’s relationship with the city is being remade in the image of fast capital and consumer citizenship. As filtered through condominium ownership, neoliberal ideologies are not freeing women from constraints - they are reinforcing patriarchal norms. This fresh look at urban revitalization exposes the notion of women’s emancipation through condominium ownership as a marketing ploy rather than a major shift in gender relations.

8 The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

Moving from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks to Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules, from Henry Darger’s hoarding to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.

9 Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, and Resistance by Adonia Lugo

Bicycle / Race paints an unforgettable picture of Los Angeles―and the United States―from the perspective of two wheels. This is a book of borderlands and intersections, a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting infrastructure before culture, and a coming-of-age story about power and identity. The colonial history of southern California is interwoven through Adonia Lugo's story of growing up Chicana in Orange County, becoming a bicycle anthropologist, and co-founding Los Angeles's hallmark open streets cycling event, CicLAvia, along the way. 

10 Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City by Mary Pattillo

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.

11 The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo by Saskia Sassen

Since the book originally came out in 1991，it has become a classic on global city studies.

12 Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg

California's Bay Area is home to nearly a third of the venture capital and internet businesses in the United States, generating a boom economy and a massive influx of well-paid workers that has transformed the face of San Francisco. Once the great anomaly among American cities, San Francisco is today only the most dramatically affected among the many urban centers experiencing cultural impoverishment as a result of new forms and distributions of wealth.

A collaboration between writer-historian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City surveys San Francisco's transformation—skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the poor; the homogenization of the city's architecture, industries and population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its sites of civic memory.

13 Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow

Like a modern-day Jane Jacobs, Janette Sadik-Khan transformed New York City's streets to make room for pedestrians, bikers, buses, and green spaces. Describing the battles she fought to enact change, Streetfight imparts wisdom and practical advice that other cities can follow to make their own streets safer and more vibrant.

14 Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment by Leslie Weisman

Leslie Kanes Weisman offers a new framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of gender and race as well as class. She traces the social and architectural histories of the skyscraper, maternity hospital, department store, shopping mall, nuclear family dream house, and public housing high rise. In presenting feminist themes from a spatial perspective, Weisman raises many new and important questions. When do women feel unsafe in cities, and why? Why do so many homeless people prefer to sleep on the streets rather than in city-run shelters? Why does the current housing crisis pose a greater threat to women than to men? How would dwellings, communities, and public buildings look if they were designed to foster relationships of equality and environmental wholeness? And how can we begin to imagine such a radically different landscape? 

15 Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design by Bess Williamson

Have you ever hit the big blue button to activate automatic doors? Have you ever used an ergonomic kitchen tool? Have you ever used curb cuts to roll a stroller across an intersection? If you have, then you’ve benefited from accessible design―design for people with physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking.Richly detailed, with stories of politics and innovation, Bess Williamson’s Accessible America takes us through this important history. 

16 Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

Naked City is a sobering update of Jacobs' legendary 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Like Jacobs, Zukin looks at what gives neighborhoods a sense of place, but argues that over time, the emphasis on neighborhood distinctiveness has become a tool of economic elites to drive up real estate values and effectively force out the neighborhood "characters" that Jacobs so evocatively idealized.

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