58 books like The Image of the City

The book that propelled the fight against modernist city planning–think urban renewal or interstate highways–is still a thrill to read 62 years after its publication.

Generating most of her insights by walking the city streets and living in Greenwich Village, Jacobs shows how dense neighborhoods with diverse land uses generate valuable "weak ties" while avoiding the suffocating conformity of small towns.

Jacobs did not just talk the talk; she walked the walk–getting arrested for protesting Robert Moses’ plan to slice a highway through lower Manhattan. Embraced by both libertarians and progressive new urbanists, Jacobs still generates controversy, but you can feel her love for urban neighborhoods on every page.  

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 book reports on a research project, this time undertaken by Christopher Alexander and his students.  It is one of a number of books that attempts to ask deep questions about how places grow, and in particular about how they can grow positively in a manner that we instinctively feel to be ‘good.' Like Cullen’s book, this deeply influenced my own studies, this time of planning, when I remember conducting an experiment focused on piecemeal growth with a fellow student. The project emulated Alexander’s method and taught me a key lesson that has informed my own work ever since, namely that urban design is primarily a process. Get the process right and you are much more likely to get the outcomes you desire.

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. 

The 1960s saw Britain destroy more of its own built environment than all the bombing of the second world war. The car was king, the high rise and the shopping precinct transformed city centres. In many cases this is now seen as a disaster. Otto Saumarez Smith, one of the brightest of the rising generation of architectural writers, tells us how and why it happened, why it stopped and why he has come to love some of it. 

I think this book is very illuminating in learning the social aspect of sustainability.

She particularly focuses on urban regeneration projects in European cities. It shows how social sustainability can be assessed, measured, and monitored by using various regeneration projects in five European cities (Sant Adria de Besos in Spain, Turin in Italy, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Leipzig in Germany, and Cardiff in the UK).

I like this book because of its comprehensive assessment of the social sustainability of these projects by examining the institutional arrangements, financial products and tools, stakeholders’ involvement, and their contribution, monitoring, and measurement systems. In this way, it provides us with a new framework for assessing social sustainability. 

Cities all over the country were busy wrecking their own architectural heritage in the mid-20th century during the heyday of “slum clearance,” but Tucson experienced an especially painful loss: multiple blocks of irreplaceable colonial townhouses in Barro Viejo turned to dust for the sake of an ugly convention center.

Lydia Otero explains how and why this was allowed to happen with the exactitude of a scholar and the muted outrage of one who came from the community mourning the loss.

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 book is as much about urban design and landscape architecture as about architecture, its annotated sketches demonstrating how good places respond to their contexts.

I like its straightforward, practical, and concise approach. Although billed as ‘a manual for designers’, it is equally useful in analysing why some environments work, both practically and emotionally, and others don’t.

It is opinionated, not afraid to criticise as well as applaud. 

Mixing philosophic insight with the study of history, biology, and social science, Mumford’s penetrating analysis laid bare the prospects and pitfalls of American culture as no writer had done before. The Great Depression revealed the inability to build stable well-balanced communities that Mumford traced to a pioneer heritage predicated on exploiting resources. Setting humanity’s potential within nature’s prescribed limits, The Culture of Cities articulated the next stage in human evolution: balancing "ecological relations" and “consumer desires.” He envisioned a regional city that harmonized the “urban, rural, and primeval landscapes” that prefigured sustainability: “people in all their ecological relations” inhabiting “the compact and coherent form of the actual environment.” The goal, he concluded, was to sustain “the richest types of human culture and the fullest span of human life.”