Until you’ve consumed all of the best City Planning books, can you even claim to be a true fan?
- Urban Planning For Dummies (2012)
- The Works: Anatomy of a City (2007)
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1992)
- The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life (2017)
- Life After Carbon: The Next Global Transformation of Cities (2018)
- Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2013)
- City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction (1983)
- The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (Dover Architecture) (1987)
- Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places (2017)
- Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places (2018)
- Handbook of Biophilic City Planning & Design (2017)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 Library 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.
Local Government Law; A Practical Guidebook for Public Officials on City Councils, Community Boards, and Planning Commissions
Author(s): Gerald A. Fisher
ID: 2989658, Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2021, Size: 2 Mb, Format: epub
City and Transportation Planning: An Integrated Approach
Author(s): Akinori Morimoto
ID: 3038508, Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2021, Size: 17 Mb, Format: pdf
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
ID: 2467733, Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Year: 2020, Size: 7 Mb, Format: pdf
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.