There are countless Urban Planning courses, tutorials, articles available online, but for some, having a book is still a necessity to learn. This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1992)
- Planning and Urban Design Standards (2006)
- Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (2014)
- Urban Planning For Dummies (2012)
- Becoming an Urban Planner: A Guide to Careers in Planning and Urban Design (2010)
- Contemporary Urban Planning (2016)
- Urban Analytics (Spatial Analytics and GIS) (2018)
- The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life (2017)
- Planning in the USA: Policies, Issues, and Processes (2008)
- Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2013)
- Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (2017)
- The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (Oxford Handbooks) (2015)
- Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (Urban and Industrial Environments) (2019)
- The Works: Anatomy of a City (2007)
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.
Planning and Urban Design Standards (2006)
The new student edition of the definitive reference on urban planning and design Planning and Urban Design Standards, Student Edition is the authoritative and reliable volume designed to teach students best practices and guidelines for urban planning and design.
Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (2014)
Charles Montgomery’s Happy City is revolutionizing the way we think about urban life. After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. 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?
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.
Becoming an Urban Planner: A Guide to Careers in Planning and Urban Design (2010)
Becoming an Urban Planner answers these key questions: What do urban planners do? What are the educational requirements? How do I enter the field? How do I choose between the different types of planning, from land use planning to policy planning? What is the future of the urban planning profession?
Contemporary Urban Planning (2016)
Planning is a highly political activity. It is immersed in politics and inseparable from the law. Urban and regional planning decisions often involve large sums of money, both public and private, with the potential to deliver large benefits to some and losses to others.
Urban Analytics (Spatial Analytics and GIS) (2018)
The economic and political situation of cities has shifted in recent years in light of rapid growth amidst infrastructure decline, the suburbanization of poverty and inner city revitalization. At the same time, the way that data are used to understand urban systems has changed dramatically. Urban Analytics offers a field-defining look at the challenges and opportunities of using new and emerging data to study contemporary and future cities through methods including GIS, Remote Sensing, Big Data…
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.
Planning in the USA: Policies, Issues, and Processes (2008)
This extensively revised and expanded third edition of Planning in the USA continues to provide a comprehensive introduction to the policies, theory and practice of planning. Discussing land use, urban planning and environmental protection policies, this fully illustrated book explains the nature of the planning process and the way in which policy issues are identified, defined and approached.
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.
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (2017)
As New York City’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of one of the world’s greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and bikers. Her approach was dramatic and effective: Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved the bottom line of businesses.
The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (Oxford Handbooks) (2015)
The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning is an authoritative volume on planning, a long-established professional social science discipline in the U.S. and throughout the world. Edited by Rachel Weber and Randall Crane, professors at two leading planning institutes in the United States, this handbook collects together over 45 noted field experts to discuss three key questions: Why plan? How and what do we plan? Who plans for whom?
Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (Urban and Industrial Environments) (2019)
The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the Global North. Grounding Urban Natures makes the case for the importance of place and time in understanding urban environments.
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.
Best Urban Planning Books That You Need
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 urban 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.
Planning for Cities in Crisis: Lessons from Gondar, Ethiopia
Author(s): Mulatu Wubneh
ID: 3599554, Publisher: Springer, Year: 2023, Size: 14 Mb, Format: pdf
Smart Urban Mobility: Transport Planning in the Age of Big Data and Digital Twins
Author(s): Ivana Semanjski
ID: 3682203, Publisher: Elsevier, Year: 2023, Size: 8 Mb, Format: pdf
Urban and Transit Planning: City Planning: Urbanization and Circular Development
Author(s): Francesco Alberti, Abraham R. Matamanda, Bao-Jie He, Adriana Galderisi, Marzena Smol, Paola Gallo
ID: 3692541, Publisher: Springer, Year: 2023, Size: 14 Mb, Format: pdf
Please note that this booklist is not errorless. Some books are really best-sellers according to Los Angeles Times, others are drafted by unknown writers. 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.