18 books like How to Turn a Place Around

Cities have become more pedestrian-friendly over the last decade and Jeff Speck’s book is one of the reasons for this movement. Walkability saves lives, promotes a sense of community, and makes places more sustainable. Speck’s guide to “Ten Steps of Walkability” is an instant classic in the practice of urban planning with approachable ideas such as “mixing uses” and “getting parking right” that can help bridge the gap between activists, politicians, and developers to work together improve any community.

This is one of my favorite books to introduce to my students because it makes a powerful statement about the need for spaces within cities where people can come together to share their everyday experiences. Klinenberg shows how libraries, parks, churches, schools, and other public places represent the “social infrastructure” of a community that serve both functional needs and social purposes that can help overcome social exclusion and unite communities.

Every community can benefit from a thriving “main street” and this book’s opening drew me in with a walk down Coventry Road in my hometown of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, capturing the essence of what gives meaning to special places. The author is a social psychiatrist who operates from the fascinating premise that a thriving Main Street is a sign of a healthy urban body, but a community without a strong center can be seen as having a social disease. It’s also a fun read with lots of scribbled drawings and listicles of good advice for creating communities that promote deep personal connections.

This book is a call to action for communities to create more diverse housing opportunities. Missing middle housing refers to a wide range of housing types that are gradually disappearing from US cities, including duplexes, smaller homes, and garden apartments. These types of housing have traditionally represented an affordable option within cities that also promotes a sense of community. The book’s premise falls in line with my own experience growing up in an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, where there were single-family homes, duplex and triplex houses, small apartment buildings, and a genuine Rockefeller mansion all in the same thriving neighborhood. The book goes beyond design with lots of “how to” advice on building local support for city leaders, real estate developers, and residents to work together to create stronger and more affordable communities.

Holly Whyte is a sort of godfather to my book. He was a journalist turned urbanist who became extremely influential in New York City by focusing on how exactly people used public space. He and his team would set up cameras around plazas and small parks to document the ways New Yorkers sat, strolled, and schmoozed. Their findings, along with Whyte’s profoundly optimistic vision of people as the solution to urban problems, laid the foundation for transformative changes in places like Bryant Park and Times Square. You’ll never look at the city the same way after reading this, both in terms of the built environment and in how people act in public space.

A richly illustrated presentation of a foundational figure, Olmsted believed that parks were integral to physical and mental health and he designed the park to give citizens immediate and visceral contact with nature. His genius was to meld art and psychology on functional lines to produce settings of extraordinary beauty. After his initial masterpiece, Central Park, his vision broadened as he planned his projects in a more comprehensive manner. Riverside, Illinois was an exemplary suburb that harmonized with nature, while Boston’s Emerald Necklace’s array of parks linked by greenways and pedestrian paths was a prototype park system and cultural statement. Its interconnected network of transcendental oases allowed escape from the strident, accelerated movement of a profit-propelled society. Like Henry David Thoreau sauntering through the Concord countryside, urban dwellers could move through the city to their own tune. A timeless vision, it is why Olmsted still inspires the good life of… show more.

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.  

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. 

Janette Sadik-Khan is one of my absolute heroes. What she has done to transportation and streets in North America and globally is unprecedented. She has not only described why we must change our view of traffic in cities, she also described how and was able to make it real. As New York City’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed to transform the streets of one of the world’s greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and cyclists. Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved businesses. Streetfight deconstructs, reassembles, and reinvents the future street.

The book is beautifully presented as a series of annotated diagrams, one for each rule of thumb. This is a very powerful communication tool for explaining principles of sustainable design that designers can understand and then apply to their own projects. The concepts span design considerations from the scale of the room to the city to the globe - benefiting interior designers, architects, landscape architects, and urban designers alike. I would urge all designers to create a sustainability diagram of every project during the design process.