The best books about what happens when cities fall apart

Great writing on cities is rarer than it should be. The late Mike Davis, using Los Angeles as his muse, showed me—and so many others—new ways of thinking about cities through his vividly and passionately argued prose. Weaving together strands of architecture, urban history, social justice, and ecology, Davis has inspired me like no other author to examine cities critically, from unexpected perspectives and with a fierce point of view. Underlying his outrage at the injustices of the unravelling metropolis is a mordant sense of humor—making him an unbeatable guide as we all ride shotgun through desperate times. 

Robert Sullivan sits squarely in the engagé mode of urban chronicles. Excitable and often wildly entertaining, he taught me how unpromising facets of city life could be mined as revelatory pieces of the larger urban mosaic. Whether examining the ever-confounding urban malaise of rats, or scavenging the landfills of New Jersey for the ruins of New York’s old Pennsylvania Station—as in his book The Meadowlands, which I particularly recommend—Sullivan artfully extrapolates meaning from the mundane. To get there, he puts himself and his sometimes delirious obsessions at the heart of the story, his journey of discovery one with our own.

A gnawing hunger for the truth animates this towering author’s work on Robert Moses, New York City’s longtime “master builder” who reshaped and indisputably wrecked large chunks of thriving Gotham over the first half of the twentieth century. This book was staggeringly influential for me as a young urbanist and author coming to grips with the forces that mold the urban landscape. Caro’s intrepid, old-school reporting—a model of investigative journalism, the likes of which we could sorely use more of today—showed how one dogged writer could blow open the portals of power, hold the mighty to account, and reframe how we see our world.

Little can match the raw power of urban photographer Camilo José Vergara’s images of our culture’s collective built fabric unraveling in plain sight. For more than four decades, Vergara has borne witness, in Detroit, in Newark, in Camden—in some of the most forgotten communities in America—to the devastating physical impacts of social, political, and economic forces gone relentlessly awry. In these chronicles marked by unassumingly brave, first-person pilgrimages to decaying mansions and among toppled public housing towers, Vergara helped me see what kind of mettle it truly takes to get the story straight.

During the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when I was working on my own book and the motif of demolition was suddenly inescapable, this modest children’s book was published. In lovely gouache, Maira Kalman encapsulates the story of the salvaged fireboat John J. Harvey and its heroic journey on that dark day. As I struggled to make sense of a world falling apart, this book was a breath of fresh air. Kalman shows how to meld urban history and tragedy in a tale told with supreme deftness and charm that ennobles, no matter your age. Above all, her volume stands as a hopeful tribute to the power of collective human action, against all odds, to turn the tide.