Until you’ve consumed all of the best City Planning books, can you even claim to be a true fan?
1. Urban Planning For Dummies (2012)
With the majority of the world’s population shifting to urban centres, urban planning—the practice of land-use and transportation planning to help shape cities structurally, economically, and socially—has become an increasingly vital profession. In Urban Planning For Dummies, readers will get a practical overview of this fascinating field, including studying community demographics, determining the best uses for land, planning economic and transportation development, and implementing plans. Following an introductory course on urban planning, this book is key reading for…
2. The Works: Anatomy of a City (2007)
Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of…
3. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1992)
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others…
4. The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life (2017)
2017 PROSE Award Winner: Outstanding Scholarly Work by a Trade PublisherIn the vein of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, Jonathan F. P. Rose—a visionary in urban development and renewal—champions the role of cities in addressing the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the twenty-first century.Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of eighty percent of the…
5. Life After Carbon: The Next Global Transformation of Cities (2018)
The future of our cities is not what it used to be. The modern-city model that took hold globally in the twentieth century has outlived its usefulness. It cannot solve the problems it helped to create—especially global warming. Fortunately, a new model for urban development is emerging in cities to aggressively tackle the realities of climate change. It transforms the way cities design and use physical space, generate economic wealth, consume and dispose of resources, exploit and sustain the natural ecosystems, and prepare for the future. In Life After Carbon, urban…
6. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2013)
A Best Book of the Year according to Planetizen and the American Society of Landscape Architects 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 thetypical American city; it is eminently achievable and its benefits are manifold. Walk-able City―bursting with sharp observations and key insights into how urban changehappens―lays out a practical, necessary, and inspiring vision for how to make…
7. City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction (1983)
Text and black and white illustrations show how the Romans planned and constructed their cities for the people who lived within them. #63,508 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2993 in Schools & Teaching (Books) #4841 in Children’s Literature (Books) #34 in Children’s Architecture Books (Books) Would you like to ?If you are a seller for this product, would you like to ?…
8. The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (Dover Architecture) (1987)
In this 1929 classic, the great architect Le Corbusier turned from the design of houses to the planning of cities, surveying urban problems and venturing bold new solutions. The book shocked and thrilled a world already deep in the throes of the modern age.Today it is revered as a work that, quite literally, helped to shape our world. Le Corbusier articulates concepts and ideas he would put to work in his city planning schemes for Algiers, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Geneva, Stockholm, and Antwerp, as well as schemes for a variety of structures from a museum in Tokyo to the United Nations buildings. The influence…
9. Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places (2017)
Cities across the globe have been designed with a primary goal of moving people around quickly—and the costs are becoming ever more apparent. The consequences are measured in smoggy air basins, sprawling suburbs, unsafe pedestrian environments, and despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, a failure to stem traffic congestion. Every year our current transportation paradigm generates more than 1.25 million fatalities directly through traffic collisions. Worldwide, 3.2 million people died prematurely in 2010 because of air pollution, four times as many as a decade earlier. Instead of planning…
10. Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places (2018)
“Cities are the future of the human race, and Jeff Speck knows how to make them work.” —David Owen, staff writer at the New Yorker Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable—for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment—yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his bestselling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making…
11. Handbook of Biophilic City Planning & Design (2017)
What if, even in the heart of a densely developed city, people could have meaningful encounters with nature? While parks, street trees, and green roofs are increasingly appreciated for their technical services like stormwater reduction, from a biophilic viewpoint, they also facilitate experiences that contribute to better physical and mental health: natural elements in play areas can lessen children's symptoms of ADHD, and adults who exercise in natural spaces can experience greater reductions in anxiety and blood pressure. The Handbook of Biophilic City Planning & Design offers practical advice and inspiration…
Best City Planning Books that Should be on Your Bookshelf
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Genesis and download some city planning books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
Social Urbanism in Latin America: Cases and Instruments of Planning, Land Policy and Financing the City Transformation with Social Inclusion
Author(s): Carlos Leite, Claudia Acosta, Fernanda Militelli, Guillermo Jajamovich, Mariana Wilderom, Nabil Bonduki, Nadia Somekh, Tereza Herling
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Year: 2020, Size: 7 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2467733
Urban Planning Against Poverty: How to Think and Do Better Cities in the Global South
Author(s): Jean-Claude Bolay
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Year: 2020, Size: 18 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2469216
Transport and town planning: the city in search of sustainable development
Author(s): Laterrasse, Jean
Publisher: ISTE Ltd ; Hoboken, Year: 2019, Size: 35 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2351694
An ordinary city : planning for growth and decline in New Bedford, Massachusetts
Author(s): Hollander, Justin B
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, Year: 2018, Size: 6 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2134577
City Logistics 2: Modeling and Planning Initiatives
Author(s): Eiichi Taniguchi, Russell G. Thompson
Publisher: Wiley-ISTE, Year: 2018, Size: 18 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2232441
Green City Planning and Practices in Asian Cities
Author(s): Zhenjiang Shen, Ling Huang, KuangHui Peng, Jente Pai
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Year: 2018, Size: 18 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2249927
Shaping Portland: Anatomy of a Healthy City
Author(s): Paddy Tillett
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2018, Size: 1 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2355973
The Millennial City: Trends, Implications, and Prospects for Urban Planning and Policy
Author(s): Markus Moos; Deirdre Pfeiffer; Tara Vinodrai
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2018, Size: 6 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2445722
Planning for greying cities: age-friendly city planning and design research and practice
Author(s): Chao, Tzu-Yuan Stessa
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2018, Size: 4 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2579653
Education, Space and Urban Planning: Education as a Component of the City
Author(s): Angela Million, Anna Juliane Heinrich, Thomas Coelen (eds.)
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Year: 2017, Size: 7 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 1675888
Please note that this booklist is not absolute. Some books are absolutely record-breakers according to Los Angeles Times, others are composed by unknown authors. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant books you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.