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The Top Urban Planning Books of 2019
Planetizen releases its annual list of top urban planning books of 2019.
Josh Stephens, James Brasuell, The Top Urban Planning Books of 2019
Source：https://www.planetizen.com/features/107400-top-urban-planning-books-2019
Planetizen releases its annual list of top urban planning books of 2019, covering many sub-disciplines involved in urban movements, public organizations, ballpark, bus transit, air pollution, urban history, and emerging schools of urban planning and the related debates.1 Ballpark: Baseball in the American CityPaul Goldberger Knopf
May 14, 2019, 384 Pages
Ballpark is primarily a work of architectural criticism but also an incisive bit of commentary on the evolution of the American city and of American society. Goldberger's eye for design is as sharp as ever, and his sense of history lucid. Touching on many(but not all) stadiums in the history of Major League Baseball, Golberger convincingly argues for the primacy of ballparks in city life,as civic monuments, capitalist enterprises, and, sometimes, white elephants. He also argues that the game of baseball and, by extension, its venues represent quintessentially American combinations of urban and rural, highbrow and lowbrow, and historical and contemporary. He draws cultural, stylistic, and economic connections directly from the founding of professional baseball in 1860s Brooklyn right up to opening day at Atlanta's jarringly suburban SunTrust Park (MLB's newest) in 2017—and speculates about a few parks in development. Along the way, Ballpark implicitly traces the story of American urban development and redevelopment as the prewar "jewel boxes" of the East Coast gave way to the modernist stadiums of the West Coast, the "concrete doughnuts" of the era of urban revitalization, and the retro era that swept the country in the 1990s and 2000s. Ballpark recreates cityscapes of the past with breathtaking intimacy and plays up the sense of nostalgia that, for better or worse, characterizes America's pastime. 2 Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit
Steven Higashide
October 9, 2019, 169 pages
In the world of transportation and land use planning, buses remain a glaring missed opportunity, a sorely neglected tool, and a frustrating disconnect. Luckily, the bus has a champion in Steven Higashide, who writes the new book Better Buses, Better Cities with the clarity of conviction to significantly raise the level of discussion on the subject of public transit, and especially bus transit.Higashide works for TransitCenter, so some of the expertise and clarity found in these pages is institutional, but nothing about these chapters comes off as dogmatic or cautious. Higashide provides every kind of evidence for the user experience of an effective bus system, as only a seasoned busrider and well educated expert could. Higashide also pragmatically reroutes every description of a well planned and maintained bus system back to a discussion about how to win the investments and political support necessary to make that vision of bus transit a reality.More threats to more efficient and useful public transportation systems loom, after a decade of broken promises and failed potential fromride-hailing companies and autonomous car companies. Better Buses, Better Cities offers hope that cities still have alternatives to car-centric planning, and it's still possible to transform the public realm to improve the quality of life of every resident. Armed with thisbook, an informed citizen, commuter, planner, or politician can have a role in that transformation.3 Cities: The First 6,000 Years
Monica Smith
April 16, 2019，304 Pages
Though cities have been around for, as Smith's title says, six millennia, the examples that contemporary urban planners can draw from Bronze Age settlements are, arguably, more relevant than ever. Transportation technologies (e.g., shoes) and civic virtues (e.g., proximity) pioneered by ancient peoples are more relevant than ever in the Information Age. An archeologist by trade, Smith investigates the form and function of ruins and relates them to familiarly quotidian matters, like waste, food, commerce, innovation, and movement. Smith draws connections between ancient cities throughout the world, from Mesopotamia to Rome to India to China. Smith discusses cities' historical role in creating the middle class—however that might be defined in a givenplace and era—as well as the infrastructure and governmental structures necessary to facilitate commerce. Smith's work is important in part becausemany ancient cities are also modern cities and because the same aspirations and processes that created the first tiny settlements—those of individuals seeking better lives and strength in numbers—are the same that create the modern megacities of today. 4 Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution
April 19, 2019, 312 Pages
Nearly every plan drafted in the United States since 1963 has explicitly or implicitly referred to air pollution. The cars that drivearound cities create pollution, and the people who live and work alongside those cars breathe it in. Pollution is taken to be a "bad thing"—whichit is—but it's likely that most people know only the slightest details about the poisons they're breathing and the policies that regulate them. If planners are responsible for what goes on the ground, Choked helps them understand what's going on in the air above. Choked includes crucial insights into biology and chemistry while touring some of the world's most famously polluted places, including Dehli, Los Angeles, and London. It includes hopeful notes like Berlin and China and unpacks the Clean Air Act, illustrating vastly divergent responses to what is perhaps the greatest negative externality the world has ever known. Choked offers invaluable background knowledge for planners advocating for increased densitiesand alternative transportation and environmental justice. 5 Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
Alain Bertaud
December 4, 2018, 413 pages
Bertaud asks planners to think more like economists and less like designers, because the labor market has a great deal more power to shapecities and growth than the recent history of urban planning in the United States allows.Fans of command and control planning powers, currently only in use in North Korea and China, according to Bertaud, will be challenged by the rhetoric of Order without Design. Bertaud also repeatedly decries planning for "urban villages" as a fiction and a fantasy, for another example ofthe grenades Bertaud lobs in the direction of the planning profession throughout this book. It's important to note, however, how many of the prescriptions of the market urbanism approach to planning resemble the prescriptions of an emerging school of pro-development and pro-mobility thought among planners.It might not be a message planners want to hear, but that probably means they should listen any way: sometimes city building forces are more powerful than bureaucracy or design. Understanding more of the what, when, where, why, and how of the market can help planners be more effective in regulating, and sometimes choosing not to regulate, the city.6 Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life
David Sim
August 20, 2019, 256 Pages
For every progressive planner who has struggled to explain the logic of infill development, the pointlessness of setbacks, and all the alternative urban realities that currently elude many U.S. cities, Soft City might prove an invaluable companion. Written by Denmark-based architect David Sim, Soft City does not propose any radical new ideas for how cities can look and function. What it does do is recount progressive planning principles—call them what you will: smart growth, transit-oriented development, people-centric cities, etc.—and display themvisually with clear, appealing graphics. It reveals different approaches to density, different approaches to building configuration, and all the different approaches used by cities to design streets and sidewalks more humanely and equitably. Soft City is arguably idealistic and decidedly Eurocentric, but that's partly the point: American cities have developed some pretty mediocre urban patterns; Soft City shows us what they're missing. 7 Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
Charles L. Marohn
October 1, 2019, 256 pages
Strong Towns, and, by extension its founder, Charles Marohn, is often cited as an example of non-partisan planning politics, or a contemporary version of the compassionate conservatism of yesteryear. As evident in this book, Strong Towns invites planners and planning-interested citizens to question their assumptions about development, infrastructure, and the policiesthat pay for the whole thing (or don't pay for it, as it were). There is no cow too sacred for Marohn, who throughout a history as a public figure and now in the pages of this books completely skewers the structural deficits created by the past few generations of U.S. planning and development history.Strong Towns doesn't solely exist to criticize, however. Marohn devotes numerous chapters of this book to charting a path forward, describing the Strong Towns vision for rational policies and productive placemaking. Marohn describes the transformation sought by the Strong Towns movement as abottom-up process of collaboration, using terms familiar to progressives and grassroots organizers who will find these arguments against government waste surprisingly persuasive.You won't have to be a card-carrying member of the Strong Towns movement to take value from this book. You also won't have to agree with everything you read in these pages to benefit from the addition of a persistent, nagging voice in the back of your mind reminding you to follow the money, double check the numbers, and expect your hard-earned tax dollars to be money well spent.8 This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West
Christopher Ketchum
July 16, 2019, 432 Pages
The majority of city folk probably know about the world's and the country's environmental crises: climate change, habitat loss, extinctions, and so forth. Christopher Ketchum wants everyone to know that it's far worse than anyone can, or wants, to imagine. This Land exposes both the perpetrators and the enablers of the degradation of the American West. The former group are obvious suspects: ranchers, drillers, loggers, and miners who want to graze on or dig up as much of the rural West aspossible. The enablers, according to Ketchum, are almost all ofthe federal agencies that are charged, supposedly, with protecting those lands—or at least managing them responsibly. Instead, he accuses agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management of essentially doing the bidding of rural and industrial stakeholders, knowing that they are beyond the watchful eyes of most Americans. This Land is imbalanced and fiercely opinionated—it includes scant response from those whom Ketchum accuses—but its arguments are powerful andworthy of consideration. And Ketchum does some impressive investigative reporting, going so far as to infiltrate groups of hunters and to interview Cliven Bundy in the infamous scofflaw's own home. Ketchum's sense of urgency and outrage is palpable, and this book's prose rivals that of literary and activist heroes such as Aldo Leopold and Ed Abbey. It's an essential account for anyone who cares about the American landscape. Honorable Mention
1 Brooklyn: The Once and Future City
Thomas Campanella
September 10, 2019, 552 Pages
Every writer knows that there's inherent drama in an underdog story. Brooklynis the ultimate urban underdog. Brooklyn native Campanella celebrates the onetime city, now-borough's astonishingly rich history, characterized by diversity, immigration, industrialization, decline, and now rebirth. Amazingly, this 500-page volume makes it only to the year 1970. Campanella does not coverthe borough's recent resurgence, but it is always in the background, making this painstakingly detailed history vibrant and relevant. 2 Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West
March 22, 2019, 221 pages
For Downriver, Heather Hansman takes a page from Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods to connect narratives of personal growth with knowledge of the outside world—all gained along a long, meandering path in the outdoors. In this case, the path is provided by the Green River,which Hansman sets out to navigate from headwaters in the Green River Lakes in Wyoming to its confluence with the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Parkin Utah. The 730 miles of the Green River offer numerous case studies in the complexities and risks of water management in the Western United States: farmers, ranchers, urban and rural communities, native tribes, and decades-old legal doctrine pull at the river from every side and in increasing numbers as the water flows toward the Colorado. As noted at numerous points by Hansman, paddling a river is a lot like relying on a river's flow for your business or your life: you always have to look downstream.3 Vancouverism
Larry Beasley
May 15, 2019, 424 pages
Expanding on the idea that cities should be designed—not just cobbled together on a site-by-site basis like every other major city in North America—the book makes a case for Vancouver as a model for the future ofplanning in an era of climate change, congestion, and Planners outside of Vancouver will read this book with equal parts envy and excitement: What happened in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century in Vancouver could only have happened in this corner of Canada, but every city on the continent has a chance to write its own unique version of this unique story of urban planning and city building.4 Wild LA: Explore the Amazing Nature in and Around Los AngelesLila Higgins and Gregory B. Pauly with Jason G. Goldman andCharles HoodMarch 19, 2019, 332 pages
Every city should have its own version of Wild LA. The book provides an engaging approach to the natural environment of the city—to the signs of region's pre-historical ecology still visible in the contemporary built environment to the ongoing conversation about water and its role in this semi-arid environment. The book includes a wild life guide for the city and a field trip planner to take advantage of the multi-generational learning opportunities sprinkled all over Southern California. Researched and written by a team from the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, readers are in the best possible hands for encouraging a passion for the nature found all around the second most populous city in the United States.
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