• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs (1961)
• A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander (1977)

##Recommendations

• Carmageddon: How cars make life worse and what to do about it (Daniel Knowles, 2023) - “The automobile was one of the most miraculous inventions of the 20th century. It promised freedom, style, and utility. But sometimes, rather than improving our lives technology just makes everything worse. Over the past century cars have filled the air with toxic pollutants and fueled climate change. Cars have stolen public space and made our cities uglier, dirtier, less useful, and more unequal”. In Carmageddon, journalist Daniel Knowles outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result.
• Strong Towns (Charles Marohn, 2019) - Infinite growth has been the central dogma of American urban development for decades. Unfortunately, it is completely unsustainable and has put America on track for imminent financial disaster.
• Road to Nowhere (Paris Marx, 2022) - Silicon Valley has promised that technology will save us with ride-hailing apps, self-driving cars, flying vehicles, “green” electric vehicles, algorithmic automation, and more. Walking through the history of how we got to today’s techno-solutionism, Marx argues these ideas are implausible and dangerous and that we must rethink how our cities are designed to focus on social interaction, the needs of the community, and the protection of vulnerable members of society.
• Happy City (Charles Montgomery, 2013) — Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and tower dwelling an improvement on the car-dependence of sprawl?
• Right of Way (Angie Schmitt, 2020) — The face of the pedestrian safety crisis looks a lot like Ignacio Duarte-Rodriguez. The 77-year old grandfather was struck in a hit-and-run crash while trying to cross a high-speed, six-lane road without crosswalks near his son’s home in Phoenix, Arizona. He was one of the more than 6,000 people killed while walking in America in 2018. In the last ten years, there has been a 50 percent increase in pedestrian deaths. Tragic deaths like Duarte-Rodriguez’s are not unavoidable “accidents.” They are predictable, occurring in stark geographic patterns that tell a story about systemic inequality.
• Curbing Traffic (Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, 2021) — Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people.
• Walkable City (Jeff Speck, 2013) — Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. Making downtown into a walkable, viable community is the essential fix for the typical American city; it is eminently achievable and its benefits are manifold.
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs, 1961) — A classic since its publication in 1961, this book is the definitive statement on American cities: what makes them safe, how they function, and why all too many official attempts at saving them have failed.
• *Reclaiming your community : you don’t have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one(Majora Carter, 2022) — How can we make the promise of America more accessible and equitable for everyone? What is a path toward wealth creation, quality of life, and happiness in low-status communities, whether in the inner city, in Rust Belt towns, Native American reservations, or other “marginalized” places?

##Also great

History

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
• Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States by Paul Groth (freely available online)
• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
• Uneven Development by Neil Smith
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andrés Duany
• Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton
• Car Mania: A Critical History of Transport by Winfried Wolf
• The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century by Clay McShane
• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler
• Car Country: An Environmental History by Christopher W. Wells

Practical, Present & Solutions

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town by Charles Marohn
• The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup
• Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis by Daniel G. Parolek
• Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places by Jeff Speck
• Carfree Cities by J.H. Crawford
• Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life by David Sim
• Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan
• Tactical Urbanism: Short-term Action for Long-term Change by Mike Lydon
• Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile by Taras Grescoe
• Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling by Tom Babin
• Transit Street Design Guide by National Association of City Transportation Officials
• Global Street Design Guide by National Association of City Transportation Officials
• Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit by Christof Spieler
• Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit by Steven Higashide
• Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike by Grant Petersen
• There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer
• 🆕 Movement: how to take back our streets and transform our lives by Thalia Verkade & Marco te Brömmelstroet
• Once There Were Greenfields: How Urban Sprawl is Undermining America’s Environment, Economy, and Social Fabric by Donald D. T. Chen, F. Kaid Benfield & Matthew Raimi
• Sprawl Repair Manual by Galina Tachieva
• 🆕 Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray
• 🆕 America’s Frozen Neighborhoods: The Abuse of Zoning by Robert C. Ellickson LL.B.

Futurology

• Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving by Peter Norton