Why am I passionate about this?

I was a suburban kid in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dayton, Ohio and didn’t see much wrong with my neighborhood. As someone who then grew up to write and teach about the history of cities and city planning, I’ve long been struck by the mismatch between high-brow scorn for “suburbia” and the everyday experience of people who live in suburban communities. This short book is an effort to show how the world became suburban and what that meant to people in the different corners of the world—and maybe to put in a plug for my suburban Meadow Hills and College Hill neighborhoods. 


I wrote

Suburbs: A Very Short Introduction

By Carl Abbott,

Book cover of Suburbs: A Very Short Introduction

What is my book about?

For the last two centuries, cities have spread outward at an astonishing pace. Whether in Seattle, Singapore, Sao Paolo, or…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Garden Cities of To-Morrow

Carl Abbott Why did I love this book?

No other book has had a greater influence on the ways that planners have tried to create the perfect suburban community, from England to the United States, Finland to France, Brazil to Australia.

Howard published his ideas about how to create humane suburbs more than 120 years ago with the future of London in mind, but they still resonate around the globe. Google “new towns” and the hits may be overwhelming. That’s testimony to the power of a good idea.

By the way, if you live in Columbia, Maryland or Irvine, California, you’re living in a version of “Howardville.”

Book cover of A Field Guide to Sprawl

Carl Abbott Why did I love this book?

Is a picture worth a thousand words? Urbanist Dolores Hayden sure thinks so, providing a cheeky, even snarky, guide to the worst aspects of the contemporary suburban landscape.

Brightly lit aerial photographs (many are from the American Southwest) show big box interchanges, lollipop subdivisions, tower farms for the electronic world, and all the other ways in which sprawl chews up the American land. Leaf through the pages, then you get to choose: Do you weep or do you scream in outrage?

By Dolores Hayden, Jim Wark (photographer),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Field Guide to Sprawl as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Field Guide to Sprawl was selected by the urban web site Planetizen for its list of "Top Ten Books in Urban Studies" and by Discover magazine for its list of "Top 20 Books in Science." Features on the book appeared in The New York Times and the Boston Globe.

Duck, ruburb, tower farm, big box, and pig-in-a-python are among the dozens of zany terms invented by real estate developers and designers today to characterize land-use practices and the physical elements of sprawl. Sprawl in the environment, based on the metaphor of a person spread out, is hard to define.…


Book cover of My Blue Heaven

Carl Abbott Why did I love this book?

American suburbs are all tidy middle-class places like where I grew up, right? Wrong.

Do-it-yourself housing and shantytowns were never confined to the developing world. The fringes of Toronto and Cleveland and Los Angeles could look a lot like the fringes of Sao Paolo or Istanbul in the first half of the twentieth century.

My Blue Heaven is a revelation about DIY community building on the south side of Los Angeles at the same time high-end developers were creating Pasadena and Beverly Hills. 

By Becky M. Nicolaides,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked My Blue Heaven as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the 1920s, thousands of white migrants settled in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. Six miles from down-town and adjacent to Watts, South Gate and its neighboring communities served as L.A.'s Detroit, an industrial belt for mass production of cars, tires, steel, and other durable goods. Blue-collar workers built the suburb literally from the ground up, using sweat equity rather than cash to construct their own homes. As Becky M. Nicolaides shows in My Blue Heaven, this ethic of self-reliance and homeownership formed the core of South Gate's identity. With post-World War II economic prosperity, the community's emphasis…


Book cover of Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro

Carl Abbott Why did I love this book?

The improvised communities that ring the cities of Latin America have a bad reputation as squatter towns. Not so fast.

Look beyond the surface and you will see communities with strong social ties, systems of self-government, and residents who are as committed to their neighborhood as any American suburbanite. Janice Perlman has spent decades studying the Rio de Janeiro that lies behind its beaches, and gives a clear-eyed look at some of the self-built communities on the city’s edge.

By Janice Perlman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Favela as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Janice Perlman wrote the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, a book hailed as one of the most important works in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she had first met in 1969-as well as their children and grandchildren-Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better
life. Perlman discovers that while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel more marginalized than ever.…


Book cover of What's in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries

Carl Abbott Why did I love this book?

If you are a word nerd like me, this is for you.

Every country has its own way of naming its suburbs, and often more than one way. Do-it-yourself settlements in the desert around Lima, Peru were barriadas until the government decided that pueblos jovenes or “young towns” sounds better.

Turkish gecekondu for new neighborhoods translates as “built over night.” The bidonvilles of North Africa are literally “tin can towns.” I won’t kid you, the chapters are written by academics, but they take you on a tour of improvised settlements around the world.

By Richard Harris (editor), Charles Vorms (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked What's in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Borgata', 'favela', 'periurbain', and 'suburb' are but a few of the different terms used throughout the world that refer specifically to communities that develop on the periphery of urban centres. In What's in a Name? editors Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms have gathered together experts from around the world in order to provide a truly global framework for the study of the urban periphery. Rather than view these distinct communities through the lens of the western notion of urban sprawl, the contributors focus on the variety of everyday terms that are used, together with their connotations. This volume explores the…


Explore my book 😀

Suburbs: A Very Short Introduction

By Carl Abbott,

Book cover of Suburbs: A Very Short Introduction

What is my book about?

For the last two centuries, cities have spread outward at an astonishing pace. Whether in Seattle, Singapore, Sao Paolo, or Sofia, most urban residents live in housing that has been built on the urban outskirts in the last few decades. I survey the “Brady Bunch” suburbs of the United States but also improvised communities on the edges of Latin American cities and the high-rise suburbs of Eastern Europe and East Asia. Suburban development has often been a punching bag for novelists and intellectuals, but new communities on the edge have provided shelter, jobs, and community for billions of people.

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From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine

By Ben Stanger,

Book cover of From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine

Ben Stanger Author Of From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a Harvard- and MIT-trained physician-scientist, and I am drawn to research problems that bridge the basic and the practical – how a better understanding of cells and tissues can inform new therapies for cancer and other diseases. As children, we are all scientists – mini-hypothesis generators trying to make sense of the world. I suppose I never outgrew that curiosity. My list of best science books credits writers who bring to life the excitement that comes from looking at the natural world in a new way, a spirit that I try to emulate in my own writing. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!

Ben's book list on science written by scientists

What is my book about?

Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?

FROM ONE CELL is a dive inside the cell and its evolutionary prerogatives to explain how these "endless forms most beautiful," as Charles Darwin called them, come about. Along the way, we learn about the scientific process, filled as it is with serendipity, as the story is told through the eyes of the scientists who informed…

From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine

By Ben Stanger,

What is this book about?

Every animal on Earth begins life as a single cell. From this humble origin, the nascent creature embarks on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster-yet with astounding regularity, it reaches its destination intact. From One Cell illuminates this epic transformation-still one of nature's most mysterious feats-to show where we all come from and where we're going.

Through the eyes of the scientists unraveling the secrets of development, we see how all the information needed to build a human fits into a fertilised egg, and how the trillions of cells that emerge know what to become and where to…


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