CityReads | The Top Urban Planning Books of 2020

313
The Top Urban Planning Books of 2020

Planetizen releases its annual list of top urban planning books of 2020.

Josh Stephens, James Brasuell, The Top Urban Planning Books of 2020

Source：

https://www.planetizen.com/features/111376-top-urban-planning-books-2020

1.THE ADDRESS BOOK: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask

When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won't get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.

In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany. The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we also see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata and on the streets of London. Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t—and why.

2.Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City by A.K. Sandoval-Strausz

Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less visible group: Latino and Latina newcomers.

Award-winning historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz reveals this history by focusing on two barrios: Chicago's Little Village and Dallas's Oak Cliff. These neighborhoods lost residents and jobs for decades before Latin American immigration turned them around beginning in the 1970s. As Sandoval-Strausz shows, Latinos made cities dynamic, stable, and safe by purchasing homes, opening businesses, and reviving street life. Barrio America uses vivid oral histories and detailed statistics to show how the great Latino migrations transformed America for the better.

3. Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing by Diana Lind

Over the past century, American demographics and social norms have shifted dramatically. More people are living alone, marrying later in life, and having smaller families. At the same time, their lifestyles are changing, whether by choice or by force, to become more virtual, more mobile, and less stable. But despite the ways that today's America is different and more diverse, housing still looks stuck in the 1950s.

In Brave New Home, Diana Lind shows why a country full of single-family houses is bad for us and our planet, and details the new efforts underway that better reflect the way we live now, to ensure that the way we live next is both less lonely and more affordable. Lind takes readers into the homes and communities that are seeking alternatives to the American norm, from multi-generational living, in-law suites, and co-living to microapartments, tiny houses, and new rural communities. Brave New Home offers a diagnosis of the current American housing crisis and a radical re-imagining of future possibilities.

4. City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present by Alex Krieger

This book accounts for essentially the entire scope of American urban history, starting with its namesake proclamation by John Winthrop, and goes right up to the emergence of "smart cities" and the rise of the creative class. It is reverent, but not uncritical. Its thesis is that American cities collectively always had an idealistic side to them, even in a country that reveres rural landscape and lifestyles, and that many individual cities—from Chicago to New Orleans to Las Vegas, among others—have striven toward idiosyncratic ideals. And it is not uncritical. Clearly, utopia has never been achieved in America. The hill has often been too high to climb, or urban leaders have never truly tried to climb it.

This expansive history is in stark contrast to the far angrier, sadder—and crucial—strains of criticism that have arisen in recent years, seeking social justice while also lambasting essentially everything about American urban development. Indeed, City on a Hill does not necessarily disagree with that sort of activism. But it comes from a different place. Author Alex Krieger is old-school—a venerable professor of urban design at Harvard. Cities on a Hill is clearly his life’s work, and it conveys an astonishing, inspiring degree of erudition, with easy citations from literature, religion, and the arts. City on a Hill is a rich, leisurely history.

5. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern

Anyone with an ounce of awareness probably knows, implicitly, that cities—like almost everything else in the modern world—have generally been designed by, run by, and skewed to the advantage of men. Leslie Kern, a professor of geography at Mount Allison University, delves into these inequalities and systems of oppression that take concrete shape in cities.

In Feminist City, Kern lays out the myriad ways in which men have historically dominated cities and city-building, and she explains many of the ways that women are disadvantaged, from inconveniences like curbs that don’t accommodate strollers to mortal threats like assailants who lurk around dark corners. Her account is likely to be familiar to almost every woman who lives in a city and, possibly, a revelation to many men who blithely stroll wherever and whenever they please. But while Feminist City is an alarm, it is also a celebration and a deeply personal book. Kern loves cities. She recounts many appealing anecdotes from her own adolescence and adulthood, largely in Toronto, to illustrate how exciting cities can be. But she knows that cities can be better for women and, ideally, better for everyone. Feminist City is a call for gender equity in planning (and for intersectionality), and it’s one that planners of all genders should heed.

6. Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Golden Gates might not be the last account of YIMBYism, the relatively new pro-housing movement that has arisen around the country, but it deserves credit for being the first—and for being excellent. New York Times reporter Connor Doughtery was, first and foremost, in the right place at the right time, covering the right subject: the mid-2010s, the Bay Area, and housing. Beyond that, Dougherty is also a terrific writer with an eye not only for the economic and political complexities of the housing crisis that has ravaged California and other high-cost areas but for the personalities that make up the YIMBY movement.

The book includes profiles of Sonja Trauss, the ur-YIMBY who founded the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, as well as YIMBY State Senator Scott Wiener, and many other players in the struggle to promote housing in San Francisco and beyond. Whether YIMBYism triumphs in the long run or fades into the background like an aging hippie, Golden Gates is and will be the definitive account of a distinctive moment in American urban history.

7. Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today's Housing Crisis by Dan Parolek

Few causes of planning reform from recent history have succeeded so thoroughly at adoption into the law of the land as Missing Middle Housing has in recent years, and it is only right that Parolek, who coined the term, has written this definitive guide to the subject. Missing Middle Housing is generally used to describe middle-density housing types between single-family detached dwellings and large multifamily developments. Since the middle of the 20th Century, the production housing industry has focused mostly on the low- and higher-density extremes—hence the word "missing" in missing middle.

With the benefit of beautiful full-color graphics, Parolek goes into depth about the benefits and qualities of Missing Middle Housing. The book demonstrates why more developers should be building Missing Middle Housing and defines the barriers cities need to remove to enable it to be built. Case studies of built projects show what is possible, from  the Prairie Queen Neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska to the Sonoma Wildfire Cottages, in California. There is so much potential in the United States for new kinds of density, and every unique community has numerous options to choose from in deciding how best to implement Missing Middle reforms. Parolek proves that density is too blunt of an instrument to effectively regulate for twenty-first-century housing needs. The new concept—Missing Middle Housing has great potential and is a good solution to the housing crisis.

8. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

As Keenaga Yamhahtta-Taylor, a professor of African American studies at Princeton, explains, the demise of racist redlining practices of the first half of the 20th century did not result in a bonanza of homeownership for Black Americans. Instead, it simply gave way to what she describes as "predatory inclusion." With the federal government backing mortgages for previously excluded people, a new class of lenders and real estate agents arose to push under-qualified, naive, and (often) women buyers into risky loans and then, when the moment was ripe, foreclose upon them. What’s particularly insidious about these policies is that they were invisible, existing in loan agreements and on ledgers rather than on the ground in segregated (and nominally desegregated) neighborhoods.  

9. Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

Angie Schmitt is one of the best writers and advocates on the subjects of traffic safety in the entire country. She runs Streetsblog. As detailed by Schmitt here, the number of pedestrians killed by automobiles is rising every year. Pedestrian fatalities are rising even as politicians have promised to eliminate traffic fatalities entirely. Schmitt is one of the very best contemporary journalist-advocates writing on the built environment, whose skills are most obvious when digging beneath the numbers to tell the stories of humanity, not only to the illuminating the faces and lives of the departed, but also to the specific design and political failures that allow this carnage to continue unabated. Disproportionately the victims are immigrants, the poor, and people of color. Right of Way unveils a crisis that is rooted in both inequality and the undeterred reign of the automobile in our cities. It challenges us to imagine and demand safer and more equitable cities.

10. The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs Jason Diamond

The American suburbs have taken on a mythical reputation: hyper-planned communities of uniformity, offering safety and security to some, suffocation to others. For decades the suburbs have been where art happens "despite": despite the conformity, the emptiness, the sameness. The familiar story is one of gems formed under pressure, creative transcendence fueled by suburban resentment. But what if the suburb has actually been an incubator for distinctly American art, as positively and as surely as in any other cultural hothouse? In this fascinating history, Diamond presents readers with a new way of viewing this ubiquitous environment. Mixing personal experience, cultural reportage, and history while rejecting clichés and pieties, these essays stretch across the country in an effort to show that this uniquely American milieu deserves another look. Diamond celebrates the suburbs—or at least to celebrate those instances when they aren’t totally boring. Diamond isn't an apologist for the suburbs per se. He just refuses to condemn them, and he, unlike many critics of sprawl, makes the effort to discover what can be interesting, delightful, and enriching about them.

11.The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt

The 99% Invisible podcast has a legion of regular listeners, who tune in for stories about the hidden details that define the built environment, continuing a tradition we associate with Jane Jacobs. If you're already a fan of the podcast, you'll recognize the familiar 99% Invisible voice in the written text, and the eye for detail in revealing the little things that make cities so big in our imaginations and dreams.

The subtitle of the book harkens to the field guides that usually focus on the flora and fauna of natural environment, but that approach fits the urban environment perfectly with The 99% Invisible City. Instead of turdus migratorius or pinus contorta, in this book we can identify the pavement markings and façade retrofits, in addition to signs of the urban world of flora and fauna that sometimes get overlooked in the concrete jungle.

12. The Urban Mystique: Notes on California, Los Angeles, and Beyond by Josh Stephens

With a title inspired by Betty Friedan's account of life in the suburbs, The Urban Mystique is equal part lamentation and celebration. It collects some of Josh's work from the California Planning & Development Report and elsewhere, covering everything from the minutiae of setbacks, the regional impacts of transit investments, the promise of smart growth and sustainability, the precariousness of urban politics in the 21st century, and the ineffable complexities that make all cities, be they in California or anywhere else, wondrous, maddening, and fascinating.

13.Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change by Joan Fitzgerald

Collectively, cities take up a relatively tiny amount of land on the earth, yet emit 72 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Clearly, cities need to be at the center of any broad effort to reduce climate change.

In Greenovation, the eminent urban policy scholar Joan Fitzgerald argues that too many cities are only implementing random acts of greenness that will do little to address the climate crisis. She instead calls for "greenovation"--using the city as a test bed for adopting and perfecting green technologies for more energy--efficient buildings, transportation, and infrastructure more broadly. Further, Fitzgerald contends that while many city mayors cite income inequality as a pressing problem, few cities are connecting climate action and social justice-another aspect of greenovation. Focusing on the biggest producers of greenhouse gases in cities, buildings, energy and transportation, Fitzgerald examines how greenovating cities are reducing emissions overall and lays out an agenda for fostering and implementing urban innovations that can help reverse the path toward irrevocable climate damage. Drawing on interviews with practitioners in more than 20 North American and European cities, she identifies the strategies and policies they are employing and how support from state, provincial and national governments has supported or thwarted their efforts. Greenovation helps us understand what is arguably the toughest policy problem of our era: the increasing impact of anthropocentric climate change on modern social life.

14. Intercultural Urbanism: City Planning from the Ancient World to the Modern Day Dean Saitta

Cities today are paradoxical. They are engines of innovation and opportunity, but they are also plagued by significant income inequality and segregation by ethnicity, race, and class. These inequalities and segregations are often reinforced by the urban built environment: the planning of space and the design of architecture. This condition threatens attainment of wider social and economic prosperity. In this innovative new study, Dean Saitta explores questions of urban sustainability by taking an intercultural, trans-historical approach to city planning.

Saitta uses a largely untapped body of knowledge—the archaeology of cities in the ancient world—to generate ideas about how public space, housing, and civic architecture might be better designed to promote inclusion and community, while also making our cities more environmentally sustainable. Saitta integrates this knowledge with knowledge generated by evolutionary studies and urban ethnography to provide an expansive look at what interculturally-sensitive placemaking might entail.

15. The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (and Keeping it There)

From Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Miami, US cities are struggling to address the twin crises of high housing costs and household instability. Debates over the appropriate course of action have been defined by two poles: building more housing or enacting stronger tenant protections. These options are often treated as mutually exclusive, with support for one implying opposition to the other.

Shane Phillips believes that effectively tackling the housing crisis requires that cities support both tenant protections and housing abundance. He offers readers more than 50 policy recommendations, beginning with a set of principles and general recommendations that should apply to all housing policy. The remaining recommendations are organized by what he calls the Three S’s of Supply, Stability, and Subsidy. Phillips makes a moral and economic case for why each is essential and recommendations for making them work together.

16. Reflective Planning Practice: Theory, Cases, and Methods By Richard Willson

The value of professional reflection is widely recognized, but there is a difference between acknowledging it and doing it. This book offers a reflection framework, reflection-on-action case studies, and prompts and ideas for incorporating reflection in daily practice. This book provides planners’ reflections on past practice as well as prompts for reflecting in the midst of planning episodes. It explains a reflection framework and employs it in seven case studies written by planning educators who also practice. The cases reveal practical judgments made during the planning episode and takeaways for practice, as the planners used logic and emotion, and applied convention and invention. The practical judgments are explained from the perspective of the authors’ personal experiences, purposes, and professional style, and their interpretation of the rich context that underpins the cases including theories, sociopolitical aspects, workplace setting, and roles. The book seeks to awaken students and practitioners to the opportunities of a pragmatic, reflective approach to planning practice.

Related CityReads

162.CityReads│61 Books Nassim Taleb Recommends: 31-61（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"