By Request: Books on Urbanism

Someone in the requests thread wanted me to cite real sources such as books in my posts on transportation and urban policy, and there have been several request for book recommendations generally. The trouble with making citations to books when you're writing a blog is, of course, that I mostly write the blogs in quick snatches all around town and can't lug the whole library with me. My ideas, however, are all derivative and you, too, can read the works from which I've stolen them.

The two key books to read are Christopher Leinberger's The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream which is a great overall summation of the case for urbanism and Donald Shoup's The High Price of Free Parking which takes the simple insight that nothing is ever really "free" and spins it into a tour de force. Ed Glaeser also does lots of interesting work related to the economics of cities.

Comments

What opened my eyes was "The Geography of Nowhere" by James Howard Kunstler, who has really become a kind of apocalyptic lunatic screaming on street corners, but this early work really rocked.

Posted by pdp | June 17, 2008 3:04 PM

Wait -- something does not seem right: Matthew Yglesias is recommending books, but I don't see the title Heads in the Sand anywhere in his post. What gives?!

Posted by The Modesto Kid | June 17, 2008 3:09 PM

I think you broke the golden rule of urbanism, which is to always, always, always recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities. All of you should read it.

Also The Image of the City, anything by Mike Davis, Doug Rae's City, Sennett's The Uses of Disorder, and to be educated, Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture.

Posted by Noah | June 17, 2008 3:18 PM

I'm wondering, can anyone recommend anything more specifically related to intercity and federal transportation policy. I'd really like to find a good summer read on the histroy and current status of the federal government's handling of public transportation.

Posted by Alex | June 17, 2008 3:28 PM

Also:

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

Posted by Ilya Gerner | June 17, 2008 3:29 PM

Also:

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

Posted by Ilya Gerner | June 17, 2008 3:32 PM

It's great to see so much interest in transportation and land use issues on this and other blogs. Beyond the books (Jacobs is a stone classic), be sure to check out the policy and advocacy groups who've been hard at work on this stuff for a good few years now. Surface Transportation Policy Partnership (transact.org) is a great place to start. As STPP's site shows, these issues lend themselves to public involvement at the local and regional level, so . . .

Posted by Michaels | June 17, 2008 4:16 PM

Edge City by Joel Garreau

Posted by ligedog | June 17, 2008 4:38 PM

For entry-level, I second Ilya's motion--Suburban Nation is an attractive book.

Posted by Jim M | June 17, 2008 4:59 PM

to be educated, Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture.

While I couldn't agree more with the recommendations of Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs this seems a bit foolish for a suggestion. Corbu's radiant city is antithetical to urbanism and the notion of skyscrapers in the park really has been discredited. There are certainly aspects of his philosophies and some of his great designs (Unite d' Habitation) that can be applied to improving city life and the urban fabric, but just look to Chandigarh to see the limitations of his views.

I'd say that Power Broker would be a somewhat useful book to read in terms of the enactment of urban policy, even though a modern day Moses is rather difficult to imagine. It gives a good sense of how we got to the mess that we're in now.

Posted by moniker | June 17, 2008 5:14 PM

Seconding (or thirding, if you count double posts!) Ilya's recommendation of Suburban Nation.

Posted by Nate | June 17, 2008 5:19 PM

Seconding (or thirding, if you count double posts!) Ilya's recommendation of Suburban Nation.

Posted by Nate | June 17, 2008 5:24 PM

I second the thoughts about Kunstler--his Geography of Nowhere is wonderfully, incredibly inspirational to a fatigued suburbanite (especially one who's just started university, like I had when I first read it), it's just too bad his website/recent books are so out there. I've had to avoid him for the last few years just so I can still go back to Nowhere in case I ever find myself stuck in a suburb again (unlikely). Two years of living in European "towns" that feel more dense than most Canadian (or American) cities pretty much guarantees a lifetime of urbanism for me...

Posted by Jordan | June 17, 2008 5:32 PM

Matt, when I need to cite a real book I use Google to fish out a link to Amazon or Google books. The reader can often browse them that way. this si so incredibly obvious that I am assuming I have misunderstood something and another kind reader will set me straight.

Posted by Chris Dornan | June 17, 2008 5:41 PM

Zoned Out, by Jonathon Levine, is pretty good on the situation we find ourselves in right now, regarding local planning and zoning regulations.

Posted by a.c. | June 17, 2008 6:12 PM

The Wealth of Cities by John Norquist is a decent book on the subject written from a conservative perspective. In addition to The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere by Kunstler is also good. Imagineering Atlanta is a pretty interesting book on the subject as well, though it focuses on other issues besides urbanism and is very specific to Atlanta, urbanism plays a major role.

Posted by Rob Mac | June 17, 2008 6:16 PM

_Crabgrass Frontier_ (I think it is back in print in paperback): in part a detailed study of how racial-biased mortgage and lending policies, supported by the US Government, shaped US cities in the 1920-1960 period. Also a great general overview of city development.

_City_ by William Whyte.

And yeah, actually /read/ D&LoGAC and also _Cities and the Wealth of Nations_ - they are incredibly good.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | June 17, 2008 8:10 PM

I'm sort of curious why Mixner has no book suggestions. He seems to have pretty strong opinions about urbanism and transit. Surely they must be informed by some works he'd like to share with us, no?

Posted by Tyro | June 17, 2008 9:24 PM

Matthew should spend some time reading the Ed Glaeser material he links to, because it is overwhelmingly at odds with his "new urbanism" vision.

Glaeser's paper Is there a New Urbanism? The Growth of U.S. Cities in the 1990s is particularly relevant. Glaeser summarizes his findings:

fundamentally urban growth in the 1990s looked extremely similar to urban growth during the prior post-war decades. The growth of cities was determined by three large trends: (1) cities with strong human capital bases grew faster than cities without skills, (2) people moved to warmer, drier places, and (3) cities built around the automobile replaced cities that rely on public transportation. In the 1990s (as in the 1980s), more local government spending was associated with slower growth, unless that spending was on highways.

And his paper on decentralization and employment, Decentralized Employment and the Transformation of the American City:

Most American cities are decentralized on average less than 16 percent of employment in metropolitan areas is within a three mile radius of the city center. In decentralized cities, the classic stylized facts of urban economics (i.e. prices fall with distance to the city center, commute times rise with distance and poverty falls with distance) no longer hold. Decentralization is most common in manufacturing and least common in services. The human capital level of an industry predicts its centralization, but the dominant factor explaining decentralization is the residential preferences of workers.

And this conclusion, from Cities, Regions and the Decline of Transport Costs:

The automobile has allowed cities to sprawl and eliminated any tendency towards a single city centre. These are both features of the twenty-first century. Both of the classics of urban economics, the Alonso-Muth-Mills model and the Krugman-Fujita-Thisse new economic geography, need updating. Both frameworks are analytically beautiful and remarkably apt characterisations of the city of the past. But a new regional model, without centres and without transport costs for goods, will better capture the future of the city.

Posted by Mixner | June 17, 2008 10:38 PM

Oh, and this too. From the abstract of Sprawl and Urban Growth:

Cities can be thought of as the absence of physical space between people and firms. As such, they exist to eliminate transportation costs for goods, people and ideas and transportation technologies dictate urban form. In the 21st century, the dominant form of city living is based on the automobile and this form is sometimes called sprawl. In this essay, we document that sprawl is ubiquitous and that it is continuing to expand. Using a variety of evidence, we argue that sprawl is not the result of explicit government policies or bad urban planning, but rather the inexorable product of car-based living. Sprawl has been associated with significant improvements in quality of living, and the environmental impacts of sprawl have been offset by technological change. Finally, we suggest that the primary social problem associated with sprawl is the fact that some people are left behind because they do not earn enough to afford the cars that this form of living requires.

Posted by Mixner | June 17, 2008 11:56 PM

Shorter silly glibertarian boy: "I can too spend five minutes desperately cherry-picking on an author I know nothing about."

Books? Christopher Alexander, natch. Marc Augé's Non-places is an interesting counter-study, in the sense that it explores spaces that are purged of identity.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | June 18, 2008 12:06 AM

Kunstler's early books are worth reading, but I even found those a bit too didactic for my taste. He's obsessed with form over land use or other aspects of urbanism. And now, of course, he's gone off the deep end.

Also: Jane Jacobs, Jane Jacobs, Jane Jacobs. "The Death and Life of American Cities" is the seminal, most important volume in the subject, even though in some ways it's a bit dated today. "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" is pretty fascinating, as it tackles the subject of urbanism with an approach I haven't seen anyone else tackle, and it's a pretty brilliant hypothesis. Plus, it's basically the philosophical underpinnings behind the city development system in the computer game "Civilization." So there's that.

Spiro Kostof's "The City Shaped" is fascinating and full of pictures and maps, but isn't real thick on theory. Lewis Mumford "The City in History" is a classic of urban history but it's quite long and a lot of his viewpoints have fallen out of fashion. Edmund Bacon's "Design of Cities" is kinda those two books combined, a history with lots of graphics, but without the philosophical baggage. You can read Le Corbusier's "Toward a New Architecture" if you want to see the difference between architects and city planners --- architects still think the guy's a genius, but to planners today he's completely discredited. Clay McShane's "Down the Asphalt Path" is a good overview of the history of urban transportation, discussing a lot about how cities grew around things like horse-drawn streetcars. I was quite underwhelmed by Robert Bruegmann's "Sprawl: A Compact History," which had a lot of problems in its consistency and logic; I actually agreed with his premise less after reading the book than before.

Posted by Adam Villani | June 18, 2008 6:21 AM

Also, Planetizen's "Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning" is a good concise roundup of today's planning issues.

Posted by Adam Villani | June 18, 2008 6:24 AM

I recommend Cities in Full: Recognizing and Realizing the Great Potential of Urban America by Steve Belmont. He piggybacks on Jane Jacobs (although most urbanists do as well), but does a great job of demonstrating the real benefits of density in cities. Also, he has one of the most cogent takedowns of the new urbanist movement (Duany, et al), in that by focusing on new, predesigned places, they ignore the dynamic aspects of successful urban environments.

Two other thought-provoking ideas in the book are 1) that we do far too little tearing-down in most cities, adopting a preservation template for buildings that aren't historic, significant or unique, but rather just old. 2) Some things should be in the suburbs, including modern manufacturing, which takes up far too much land to really contribute a workable urban environment. "Letting the suburbs be the suburbs," i.e. not artificially densifying the outer reaches of a metro area that can never be served well by transit---that's an idea that runs counter to most planning and urbanist discussion that I have seen.

Anyway, a good book, if a bit hard to find.

Posted by Chris Anderson | June 18, 2008 10:54 AM

Just for you Mixner:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=8373281&ch=4226720&src=news

Posted by freddiemac | June 18, 2008 11:44 AM

The Steve Belmont book sounds interesting --- New Urbanism has done a lot of good in swinging the pendulum back toward a more urban paradigm, but its most vocal proponents have been architects or other non-planners like Kunstler. As a result, it's entirely too focused on the way communities *look* than how they actually function. The Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for example, is a big New Urbanist landmark, and is a big improvement over standard suburban development, but at its core it's still just another bedroom community an hour outside of D.C.

Other noteworthy books:
Kevin Lynch, "The Image of the City." This will get you thinking of urban form from a truly urbanist viewpoint, not just architecture writ large.
Christopher Alexander, "A Pattern Language" and "The Timeless Way of Building" -- good books about how urban spaces work and how growth can occur organically.
William H. Whyte - I haven't read any of his books, but a saw a video based on his "Social Life of Small Urban Spaces," which explores the differences between how architects create space and how people actually use it.

Posted by Adam Villani | June 18, 2008 2:48 PM

The irony of "new urbanism" is that the actual communities that have been consciously built along new urbanist principles are mostly expensive, sterile, rule-bound, conservative, Stepford-esque places that no urban hipster would be caught dead in.

Posted by Mixner | June 18, 2008 3:02 PM

The irony of "new urbanism" is that the actual communities that have been consciously built along new urbanist principles are mostly expensive, sterile, rule-bound, conservative, Stepford-esque places that no urban hipster would be caught dead in.

For once I agree with Mixner. Old Urbanism is better than New Urbanism, which would in many cases be more accurately described as New Suburbanism.

Just to name one thing in specific: if your New Urbanist development involves one developer subdividing 160 acres and employing careful design work to make all the buildings in that development look like they grew organically, that is a very different thing from an older scheme in which that land was subdivided into plots and then the development of the individual parcels was left to either individuals or owners of a very limited number of plots.

Posted by Adam Villani | June 18, 2008 6:01 PM

Adam Villani,

What do you think of Ed Glaeser's work? In particular, the conclusions I quoted above from his Sprawl and Urban Growth.

Posted by Mixner | June 18, 2008 8:29 PM

I hadn't read any Glaeser before, but I just looked up an article he wrote on "The Greenness of Cities" in the NY Sun, dated January 30, 2007, and I agree 100%. The issue he describes there is precisely the debate we've been having here in Los Angeles, as both the City (whom I work for, but, as a disclaimer, am not speaking for here) and the regional planning agency have been concentrating growth in already-urbanized areas, particularly those well-served by transit, while other groups (Zev Yaroslavsky, the L.A. Weekly, etc.) seem to think we can just keep building low-density housing.

Posted by Adam Villani | June 18, 2008 9:07 PM

Did you miss the "in particular" part?

Posted by Mixner | June 18, 2008 9:28 PM

Did you miss the "in particular" part?
As a matter of fact I did.

I haven't read the book, so I can't really evaluate his claims, but I don't see anything I really object to. Actually, I would really like to read a defense of sprawl that's more cogent than Robert Bruegmann's. Without delving any farther into it, car dependence = sprawl is probably a pretty good definition, and by that definition, sprawl probably is associated with a higher standard of living. There are probably a lot more urban neighborhoods in the U.S. with relatively poor standards of living than there are with high standards. However, I would note that rising energy prices could certainly have a strong effect on the desirability of suburban-type neighborhoods. Also, the techniques that actively lead to good urban neighborhoods had been stunted for several decades until fairly recently, and that the demand for such neighborhoods currently outstrips supply and will continue to do so until planning law and practice more fully accepts them.

Posted by Adam Villani | June 18, 2008 10:46 PM

Adam,

It's a paper, not a book. You can find it in the list of Glaeser's papers that Matthew links to in his post. But here, I'll make it easy for you: Sprawl and Urban Growth

Among Glaeser's main points:

- Sprawl is very common ("ubiquitous") and growing.

- The fundamental driver of sprawl is the car. As long as cars remain the dominant means of transportation, sprawl will probably continue to be the dominant urban form (Glaeser uses "urban" in a broad sense to include suburbs and what he calls "edge cities"). Zoning and other regulations may have contributed to sprawl, but they are relatively minor factors.

- Sprawl is associated with lower congestion, shorter commute times, bigger homes, and other social benefits.

- The environmental costs of sprawl have been largely overcome through technological advances.

- Sprawl does not have significant social costs or economic productivity costs.

Posted by Mixner | June 18, 2008 11:16 PM