Best books about designing cities? Or about what makes for great cities?

Compiling Patrick OShaughnessy's tweet replies

Nov 29, 2022

I’m trying to be helpful by finding and listing the best books about designing cities and providing links to them.

Recommendations are from Patrick OShaughnessy's tweet: What are the best books about designing cities? Or about what makes for great cities?

Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag

What are the best books about designing cities? Or about what makes for great cities?

Books

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander , Sara Ishikawa , et al.

A Pattern Language @apatterntolearn

10. Magic of the City The magic in the specialization of human effort happens where it’s most concentrated. Only the lucky or rich enough get to live with easy access to it. Put the magic within reach of everyone in a metro area. Urban sprawl steals the magic.

Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back by Jane Holtz Kay
Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse by Joshua Olsen
Crisis in the Built Environment: The Case of the Muslim City by Jamel Akbar | “This book is a whole new perspective, and stand alone thesis on built environments organization, spoiler alert: it is all about rules and rights” - @maso9ich
Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town by Charles L. Marohn Jr.
Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazán
Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream by Conor Dougherty
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability by David Owen
Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery
Heart in the Right Street: Beauty, happiness and health in designing the modern city by Nicholas Boys Smith
Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems by Luis M. A. Bettencourt
Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeanneret: Chandigarh, India by Patrick Seguin
Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud (also a few bonus podcast episodes - Apple Podcasts - Spotify)
Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas | “I found the portion on group form (emergent urban conditions like favelas, Santorini, and Yazd) especially interesting in the context of modern urban planning.” - @alexisxrivas
Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: Design Strategies for the Post Carbon World by Patrick M. Condon
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West | “Cities are complex adaptive systems that can’t be designed top-down.” - @evancharles
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn Jr.
The Architecture of Community by Leon Krier
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford
The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti | “One interesting observation: strong employers and great jobs attract great workers, but the converse usually does not work nearly as well; jobs must come first.” - @KGolyaev
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro | “because it's about the forces that actually design and shape cities i.e. politics, power, influence and private interests. Reading it and using Charlie Munger's inversion principle might be a good way to design future cities.” - @PossibleValue
The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser | “It dived into some great world cities and their characteristics and what makes them great and what holds them back in some cases” - @ScalewagJim
WALKABLE CITY: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck
Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Vital Resource by David Sedlak
Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities by Ryan Gravel

Articles, Journals, Newsletters, PDFs

A Fluid-Dynamic Traffic Model on Road Networks

A Fluid Dynamic Traffic Model On Road Networks

2.41MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Bloomberg CityLab
Chris Kempes and Geoffrey West on 'The Simplicity and Complexity of Cities' (starting from page 64 of the PDF below)

Winter 2020 Issue Of The Bridge On Complex Unifiable Systems

1.61MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Liam Young - Planet City -- a sci-fi vision of an astonishing regenerative future

Startup Cities Newsletter - Startups should build cities.
Urbanized [Documentary] “Urbanized is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.”
WrathOfGnon’s Newsletter - Traditionalism, sustainability, localism, urbanism.

Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon

@patrick_oshag Start with Léon Krier. Maybe the only one writing on the subject with both theoretical and practical experience post WW2.

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