My passion from a young age has always been cities, the most fascinating of human creations. This has led me to work on them as an urban designer to help shape and guide them. I have been privileged to work on amazing projects in cities as diverse as s diverse as Toronto, Hartford, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Montréal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, St. Louis, Washington DC, Paris, Detroit, Saint Paul and San Juan Puerto Rico. On the way, I met remarkable people, learned valuable lessons, and had the opportunity to collaborate with great colleagues. I have written about these experiences in three books and had the opportunity to share my passion through teaching. I have chosen some of the books that have most inspired me on my journey.
I wrote...
Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder
This eye-opening book was a revelation to me as a young student of architecture. It provided the keys to how cities really work. Its observations are as relevant and fresh today as they were when it was published in 1961. For me and many in my generation, it helped us to see and appreciate the organic, human-centered dynamics of neighborhoods, introducing the powerful concept of “organized complexity,” which made sense of things we saw but failed to understand.
I met Jane in Toronto in 1968 where she became a lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 2006. It remains a foundational text for me in understanding urban life and my life’s work.
In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…
I loved this book. It is the biography of one of my favorite cities, tracing its trajectory from the 17th century to becoming the world’s first modern city. Jean Dejean points out the critical moves, the urban innovations, that were game changers, from the broad boulevards and the social life they supported to bridges over the Seine to the introduction of streetlights, making the city safer at night.
I was particularly taken by how, through these innovations, the city came to foster a vibrant social and civic life in a newly conceived public sphere, making Paris a model for how, through design, my profession, urban beauty, functionality, and culture could fuse to create one of the world’s great cities.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Paris was known for isolated monuments but had not yet put its brand on urban space. Like other European cities, it was still emerging from its medieval past. But in a mere century Paris would be transformed into the modern and mythic city we know today.
Though most people associate the signature characteristics of Paris with the public works of the nineteenth century, Joan DeJean demonstrates that the Parisian model for urban space was in fact invented two centuries earlier, when the first complete design for the French capital was drawn up and…
When I started my career in urban design, I was finding great success in bringing diverse groups around the table to develop ideas and find breakthrough solutions. James Surowieki’s book helped me to understand why this worked, offering compelling examples. And why, under the right circumstances, diverse groups—across different backgrounds, skills, and experiences—can often make better decisions than individual experts.
His insights had huge implications for me in dealing with cities, where the collective input of stakeholders can shape better urban outcomes. It reinforced my confidence in inclusive urban planning, participatory governance, and bottom-up approaches as a way to achieve nuanced solutions to complex urban challenges, making cities more resilient, innovative, and responsive to peoples' needs.
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.
With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.
One of the greatest challenges of urban design in my career has been overcoming the overreliance on the car and the damaging collateral damage that has caused. I have admired the work of my fellow practitioner, Jane Sadik-Khan, who has tackled this head-on from her time as New York City’s Transportation Commissioner under Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
In this book, I like the emphasis on practical and bold ways to reclaim urban spaces to create safer, more vibrant, and people-friendly environments. She has pioneered tactical urbanism—using pilot projects, public plazas, bike lanes, and traffic-calming measures—to dramatically reshape a city's streetscape. The success of these efforts has inspired cities worldwide to prioritize pedestrians, cyclists, and community life over car-dominated infrastructure.
Like a modern-day Jane Jacobs, Janette Sadik-Khan transformed New York City's streets to make room for pedestrians, cyclists, buses, and green spaces. Describing the battles she fought to enact change, Streetfight imparts wisdom and practical advice that other cities can follow to make their own streets safer and more vibrant.
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 cyclists. Her approach was dramatic and effective: Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a…
Joy is a word that is not often used to describe cities, and it should be. I very much appreciate the fact that Paul Kalbfleisch and Scott Higgins have called attention to this illusive and ineffable quality that makes city living worthwhile and fulfilling.
They have drawn inspiration from their project, the Gaslight District in Cambridge, Ontario, where they have raised the bar by transforming public spaces into places of joy, harnessing creativity, playfulness, and surprise to encourage social exchange and community cohesion. They inspire us to make these kinds of interventions part of the lexicon of city-making beyond just meeting functional requirements with real and tangible benefits in terms of health and satisfaction and even return on investment.
A new perspective on developing shared joy in urban spaces.
Our divided society is quickly reaching crisis level. We are no longer able to sustain social and economic prosperity nor ensure democracy. Fuelling this crisis is a growing sense of social isolation caused by the divisive nature of social media and the decline of infrastructure that used to bring communities together.
But there is hope for rebuilding our collaborative society, and it is found in our mid-sized urban areas. These towns and cities offer a scale that can tangibly change the quality of our lives and an intimacy that allows…
In my book, published in 2011, I tell the interwoven story of my life and my deep serial involvement with cities, from childhood in a Brooklyn neighborhood to my move to Toronto, setting up an urban design group in City Hall. I describe how much the North American city has changed within my lifetime, losing its way and how to rescue it.
I tell how I found a fertile lab for my ideas in Toronto, where I befriended fellow Vietnam War refugee Jane Jacobs and worked on bringing life back to Toronto's aging (but still living) downtown. Then, I took that learning on the road to St. Paul, MN, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Detroit, Washington, Paris, Amsterdam, Boston, and my hometown, New York City.
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.
Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence.…
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…
