Mind-Altering City Books

A Half Dozen Unforgettable Urbanism and Transit Tomes

There are a few fundamental texts that I’d recommend to anybody looking for a crash-course in urbanism and sustainable transportation. At the top of the list would be such classics as Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (about the transformation of NYC under Robert Moses); Lewis Mumford’s The City in History; and The Essential William Whyte. For more recent books, I’d add Jeff Speck’s Walkable City (a great how-to guide for urban transformation, along with its sequel, Walkable City Rules); Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic; any of the books by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, who think hard about how Dutch urbanism and cycling infrastructure can be exported; Carlton Reid’s Roads Were Not Built for Cars (he shows that in the 19th century, most were built by cyclists, for bicycles); and Sarah Seo’s Policing the Open Road.

But this dispatch isn’t about these, the usual suspects you’ll find on every urbanist’s shelf. I’ve combed my bookshelves for six of the most interesting—and often the best-written—books I’ve had the privilege of reading over my on-again, off-again career as an “urbanist.” (The older I get, by the way, the less I like this term: my innate biophilia makes me long for the rural, and the wilds, over the urban.)