Planetizen has a list of top urban planning (and related fields) books from 2022, or to be more accurate, fall 2021 through fall 2022. Lots of fields are related to urban planning, like engineering, architecture, parks and recreation, housing, transportation, infrastructure, utilities, ecology, economics, and public health to name just a handful.
First, they have an interesting list that they call “The Canon”:
- To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Reform by Ebenezer Howard
- The Death and the [sic] Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs [yes, they got the title wrong – ouch!]
- Design With Nature by Ian McHarg
- The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
- The Urban General Plan, by T.J. Kent, Jr.
- Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practices, edited by Gary Hack et al.
Anyway, here are a few from the new list that caught my eye:
- American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life by Richard K. Rein [but if you haven’t read City: Rediscovering the Center, seriously, I would stop what you are doing and read that before reading this book, or in fact before reading most of the “canon”]
- Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System by Jenny Schuetz [Some day I will take time to really delve into the problems and proposed solutions on housing. And then I will probably despair if the solutions are clear but politically impossible, like many of our problems in the U.S.]
- Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, by John Lorinc
- Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, by Paris Marx
- The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy by Sharon Zukin
- The Comprehensive Plan: Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Communities for the 21st Century by David Rouse and Rocky Piro [a textbook, for people who want or need to know about this. Engineers involved in environmental and water resources planning, for example, would benefit from knowing more about planning and planners.]
I have reached middle age as defined by having a reading list of more books than I can read in my remaining lifespan (a long list for what I hope will still be a long life). So I am not sure how many of these I will get too. But knowing they are out there is useful in case I need to brush up on a particular topic at some point.