The best academic books about critical urbanism and building sustainable communities

In this book, Patsy Healey develops an approach to understanding and evaluating governance processes of urban space by investigating ‘actors’ who are involved in these processes and their power relations.

On the one hand, she emphasizes the importance of context, such as economic, social, and environmental contexts, which impact how the physicality of space and its governance process is shaped. Using a social constructivist and relational approach, she investigates urban space, its dynamics, and governance processes and shows the multiplicity of social worlds, rationalities, and practices that co-exist in the urban context.

Healey also explores and demonstrates the complexity of the power relations between actors of urban space governance. She finds out that particular forms of the collaborative process of spaces (especially socially inclusive and just collaborative ones) can be more effective in transforming practices, cultures, and outcomes.

I think this book is very illuminating in learning the social aspect of sustainability.

She particularly focuses on urban regeneration projects in European cities. It shows how social sustainability can be assessed, measured, and monitored by using various regeneration projects in five European cities (Sant Adria de Besos in Spain, Turin in Italy, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Leipzig in Germany, and Cardiff in the UK).

I like this book because of its comprehensive assessment of the social sustainability of these projects by examining the institutional arrangements, financial products and tools, stakeholders’ involvement, and their contribution, monitoring, and measurement systems. In this way, it provides us with a new framework for assessing social sustainability. 

This is a landmark book that provides an interdisciplinary and global analysis of the 20th-century cities. 

Graham and Marvin conceive the city as a flow process, and they examine the networked infrastructure of cities such as transport, communication, energy, water, and street networks.

What I like about this book is that it helps readers to understand the complexity and the sociotechnical processes of modern cities by using urban network infrastructure and providing examples across scales from local to global examples. This book also shows us how to approach modern cities with an interdisciplinary approach by using social theories such as actor-network theory, political economy, and relational theories. 

This is one of my favourite books, as it provides a rigorous analysis of the environmental policy in the US from the 1970s and 2010.

It pinpoints the successes and failures of these policies at the subnational, regional, and state levels by using several case studies such as air and water pollution control, state and local climate change policy, open space preservation, urban growth, and regional ecosystem management.

What I also really like about this book is that readers can see various meanings of sustainability and understand that the concept can serve as a roadmap, which helps settlement systems evolve in a sustainable way.

This is another favourite book of mine because it rigorously shows communities' environmental inequalities. Agyeman identifies the critical problems of local communities regarding environmental inequalities by reviewing a series of small cases and one larger case in the US.

I like Agyeman’s reviews of these cases because they allow readers to draw valuable lessons and inspire ideas for re-interpreting environmental injustices in different localities. I also like the methodology of the book, which can be used in different localities as an approach to measuring environmental justice.

By defining performance, outcome, and accountability indicators, Agyeman helps us to measure progress toward sustainability.