Fans pick 100 books like A New Theory of Urban Design

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. 

Townscape is more than a book on how good cities are shaped. It is a book that describes generic qualities of space.

Cullens's way of understanding and analyzing urban structures with pen and paper has much to tell future architects. That the book has been around for more than sixty years is a compelling evidence of its outstanding capacity to educate generation after generation on how to create richness and avoid chaos.

Urban planners of today have much to learn from Cullen’s simple, but efficient, drawings and captions. 

This third selection was published contemporaneously with the first two, but while the first two are really polemics, this book reports on empirical research. Perhaps because of that, it may seem a little dry, but the messages it has for us about the way we perceive cities are profound (albeit they have since been challenged). If you want to understand urban design then Kevin Lynch’s body of work is a must, and this is the best place to start.  

Key to understanding cities is also to know how people experience them. Thousands of miles away but only a few years after Jacobs’ manifesto, Danish architect and urban designer Jan Gehl fascinatingly describes how people experience and behave in cities. We can use Gehl’s psychological and experiential lens to improve our urban environment, not designing buildings and cities just to appease other designers, politicians, or developers, but to real end users. Gehl’s original work has been translated into dozens of languages and expanded into one of the world’s foremost urban design firms. As an urban designer and researcher, Gehl’s book reminds me every day to focus first on people, then on space, and only then on buildings. 

Mr. Palomar, the hero, is named for the great observatory in California, and he, Mr. Palomar, is the Great Observer. He walks, he wonders about what he sees, and how, in a miraculous universe, such a thing could exist. It’s not a page-turner. It’s a page stopper. I savored each page, seeing the smallest thing – a rock, for example -- as Mr.Palomar sees it. Then I suggest that you put the book down, go out into the world, and see everything as an object of wonder.

Jenny Kayne personifies the easy, laid-back approach to design and life that is so characteristic of California. Comfort plays a role equal to that of style, which is always organic, natural, and textural. Jenni Kayne's style leans toward a neutral palette that embraces and accentuates the light, color, and texture of the California landscape. She shares work from her own home, as well as homes of other creative women who share her natural design ethos.

Last and First Men is an imagined history of the human race over two-billion years into the future. The beauty of this work is its ability to give the human race meaning and significance, whereas most other works of such scope instead seek to dwarf humanity and its significance under the scale of the universe. Stapledon achieves this by infusing his narrative with compassion, and with an underlying admiration for the process of evolution. Moreso than Darwinian evolution, the process humanity undergoes is more aligned with Hegelian, idealist dialectical movements, and implicitly evokes many questions about the nature of consciousness, our place in the universe, and what is essential about humanity. Though I cannot quite say why, the book has a refreshingly optimistic quality. I read this book shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, and it brought me much vitality.

Mircea Eliade is one of the foremost historians of religion, The Sacred and the Profane is probably his most readable book. It clearly describes what traditional (oral) religions are like and how they differ from global (book) religions. Traditional religions provide critical background for understanding some contemporary ritual practices, but most importantly for me, traditional religions provide a context for understanding the emergence of secret societies. This will be a good read for anyone interested in traditional religions, whether native American, Australian, African, or pre-Christian Europe. I highly recommend it.

The Art of Kind and Flowing Relationships helps you discover who you are and how you function from the agent Chinese Energy philosophy. The book also lets you understand how you see the world and how others perceive you.

From that angle, the author helps you to understand what you can do to understand other people and build solid and flowing relationships.  

I regularly go to this book to see how I can approach people differently by understanding them deeper, less about me and what I’m all about.

First published in 1947, this iconic book of the “Frankfurt School” could not be a study of AI and 21st-century technologies per see.

Instead it is a phantasmic explainer of how the mistakes of the past impinge on our humanity and the prospects for a better future. "What we had set out to do," Adorno and Horkheimer famously wrote in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

With spectacular erudition, the authors clearly show how the terror regime of the Nazis was rooted in the nefarious legacies of enlightenment Europe and its obsession with racial purity. As such, Adorno and Horkheimer presaged why it is that our polluted history feeds into racist AI technologies: Bad data, Adorno and Horkheimer would agree, produces bad outcomes.