I am passionate about looking for new ways to see our future. As a futurist and trend researcher for over 30 years, I am drawn to books, ideas, and people that lead us away from narrow black-and-white thinking. With the help of these mavericks, outliers, and new systemic thinking, we can shift from a naive, optimistic, or miserable pessimistic mindset to what I call a “possibilistic” outlook on society and business. We all need purpose, and mine is to show that more things are possible than we think; sometimes, we just need to look in unusual places and into unusual minds and books to find new solutions for a better future.
I don’t believe that acupuncture has ever helped me medically, but I really believe the whole concept of urban acupuncture that Jamie Lerner pioneered has helped cities and communities worldwide.
He tells great and sometimes cheeky stories about bold new urban design and how to improve life quality in cities with these “pinpricks of change.”
A visionary of sustainable urbanism reflects on the innovative projects that uplift cities in this meditative journey through vibrant communities around the world. During his three terms as mayor of Curitiba, Brazil in the 1970s and '80s, architect and urbanist Jaime Lerner transformed his city into a global model of the sustainable and liveable community. Through his pioneering work, Lerner has learned that changes to a community don't need to be large-scale and expensive to have a transformative impact, in fact, one street, park, or a single person can have an outsized effect on life in the surrounding city. In…
Growing up in a post-industrial city that bore the scars of urban renewal, I developed an early fascination with historic preservation. I began my studies as an architecture major; by my second year, I switched to American history because my passion lay in studying and understanding existing buildings and landscapes. Preserved is the product of inspiration that hit me when I spotted a beautifully preserved funeral home. Most of the neighborhood’s nineteenth-century refined residential fabric had been erased, but the grand Italianate mansion served as a reminder of what the area was like at the start of the twentieth century. At that moment, I realized that this was a story worth telling.
This was a bittersweet read for me. I grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city that was a shadow of the bustling place it was when my parents were growing up there in the 1940s and 50s. Young’s recounting of his return to the city of his childhood, Flint, Michigan, speaks to all of us who long not just for the places that we think we know but for those places that had already ceased to exist before we were born.
At the same time, Young’s poetic exploration of place, tinged with nostalgia, teaches us that even the cities and towns hardest hit by the unforgiving forces of globalization and corporate capitalism and haunted by ghosts of past prosperity can be fertile with new possibilities and new stories.
After living in San Francisco for fifteen years, journalist Gordon Young found himself yearning for his Rust Belt hometown: Flint, Michigan, the birthplace of General Motors and the "star" of the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me. Hoping to rediscover and help a place that had once boasted one of the world's highest per capita income levels but had become one of the country's most impoverished and dangerous cities, he returned to Flint with the intention of buying a house. What he found was a place of stark contrasts and dramatic stories, where an exotic dancer could afford a lavish…
Catherine McNeur is an award-winning historian, interested in the ways that issues of power impact how humans understand and transform their environments. She has long found the books, art, and other creative expressions that mischievously push at the edges of what we consider “nature” compelling, whether it’s a celebration of the beauty of weeds in an abandoned lot or nature writing on the flora in our guts. After having written about social and environmental battles in New York City, she is now researching the lives, work, and erasure of two forgotten female scientists from nineteenth-century Philadelphia. She lives in Oregon where she is a professor at Portland State University.
I’ll admit that bulldozers seem like the very antithesis of nature and that’s why I love this book. Francesca Ammon looks at how the cultural embrace of bulldozers following World War II, whether through planning, urban renewal, or even children’s books, reshaped the way Americans dealt with their environment in the second half of the twentieth century. Bulldozers gave Americans immense power to level hills, neighborhoods, and orange groves to create blank slates so they could build highways and redesign cities. This book changed the way I understood the cultural and technological rise (and fall) of this destructive tool.
The first history of the bulldozer and its transformation from military weapon to essential tool for creating the post-World War II American landscape
Although the decades following World War II stand out as an era of rapid growth and construction in the United States, those years were equally significant for large-scale destruction. In order to clear space for new suburban tract housing, an ambitious system of interstate highways, and extensive urban renewal development, wrecking companies demolished buildings while earthmoving contractors leveled land at an unprecedented pace and scale. In this pioneering history, Francesca Russello Ammon explores how postwar America came…
Few things bother me more than the negative stereotypes that portray Detroit as a deserted city in ruins - a crime-infested, neglected place where residents don’t care about their connections to the city’s history or its future. Detroit is a proud, living city. As a historical archaeologist at Wayne State University, I’ve been on the front lines of leading community-based archaeology projects in Detroit for the past decade. These projects involve advocacy for more inclusive historic preservation efforts, youth training initiatives, collaborative exhibits, and lots of interactions with the media and public. I view historical archaeology as a tool for serving local community interests, unearthing underrepresented histories, and addressing the legacies of social justice issues.
Detroit is a city shaped by social movements. Even in the city’s darkest times of violent uprisings, outmigration, and bankruptcy, ordinary Detroiters remained committed to transformative change - banding together to challenge issues of racial injustice, housing access, food sovereignty, workers’ rights, and accountable governance. A People’s Atlas of Detroit is community-based scholar-activism at its best.
The brilliantly illustrated collection of maps, essays, photographs, poetry, and interviews is the outcome of a multi-year project involving over fifty residents from all walks of life who are at the forefront of local social justice initiatives. Through its combination of radical cartography, historical perspectives, and firsthand reflections, APeople’s Atlas elevates the voices of the underrecognized people who are actively charting courses for a more equitable urban future.
In recent years, Detroit has been touted as undergoing a renaissance, yet many people have been left behind. A People's Atlas of Detroit, edited by Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safransky, and Tim Stallmann comes from a community-based participatory project called Uniting Detroiters that sought to use collective research to strengthen the organizing infrastructure of the city's long-vibrant grassroots sector and reassert residents' roles as active participants in the development process. Drawing on action research and counter-cartography, this book aims to both chart and help build movements for social justice in the city.
I'm a fifth-generation Arizonan, a former staff writer for the Arizona Republic, and a lifelong student of the Grand Canyon State. One of my very favorite things to do is travel the backroads of this amazing state and talk with the astonishing people who live there. Along the way, I wrote eight nonfiction books, including Island on Fire, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. My day job is at Chapman University, where I am an English professor.
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.
On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project--Arizona's first major urban renewal project--which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called "la calle." Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center's new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle's residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods,…
We moved to New Orleans in July 2005. We had six weeks in our first home, filling it with furniture, buying a new car, and taking advantage of my first job. When Hurricane Katrina collapsed the levees holding back the nearby lakes, our home – and those of 80% of the city – filled with water. As I waited for FEMA and insurance to help us, I saw instead it was our friends, friends of friends, and faith-based organizations that helped us get back on our feet. Using our own experiences as a start, I traveled to India and Japan to study how communities around the world survived and thrived during shocks.
We can all think of cities that have been hit by some horrible events – envision Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, hit by atomic weapons. Or the Oklahoma City bombing that leveled a whole block. Yet these cities not only survived, but thrived. In chapters written by different experts from around the world this book shows how resilient cities are to shocks and disasters. I especially liked the way that the authors focus on the way that we memorialize and remember the past, trying to learn lessons from shocks and bringing those emotions and learning into the present.
For as long as they have existed, cities have been destroyed-sacked, shaken, burnt, bombed, flooded, starved, irradiated, and pillaged-in almost every case they have risen again. Rarely in modern times has a city not been rebuilt following destruction, be it natural or man-made. The Resilient City explores urban disasters from around the globe and the ongoing restoration of urban life. It examines why cities are rebuilt, how a vision for the future gets incorporated into a new urban landscape, and how disasters have been interpreted and commemorated in built form. An international cast of historians, architects, and urban studies experts…
I have always been drawn to community, meaning how people get together, live, love, and support each other. That love drew me into caring about cities, in all their various forms, because cities are places for people to gather and build lives together. This can be in an Italian hilltown from the 1000 AD, a 15th-century neighborhood in Barcelona, an elegant street on the Upper East Side of New York City, or a subdivision near a highway interchange in Phoenix. Once I started caring about cities, I started asking why these places are the way they are, and this produced my book.
Jane Jacob’s groundbreaking, disruptive classic is first on many people’s lists. A journalist without a college degree and no formal training in urban planning, she blew up the once-established view that old-fashioned streets and buildings were done for, and that towers in the park surrounded by highways and parking lots were the way to go. Her portrait of her neighborhood in the West Village is deeply moving, and she almost single-handedly brought back these types of places as ideals.
However, she missed a lot. She didn’t understand the importance of infrastructure. She barely mentions the subways. She described her beloved streets as if they grew there, which was not the case. Reading this classic with a critical eye is the best way to do it. Jane Jacobs has become Saint Jane to many, but it’s important to see what she missed and what she got right.
In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…
I never read much urban history until I wrote one. For me, the problem was that most urban histories felt repetitive – they presented the same story over and over, just set in different locations. This was because most narrated the results of deeper, structural shifts (in spheres such as federal strategies of home finance, technological developments, demographic shifts, the rise or decline of manufacturing, political realignments, etc.) without sufficiently illuminating the causes. Regardless of whether they focus on Las Vegas or Philadelphia or Chicago or Dallas, each of these books – which I am presenting in order of publication date, not quality, as they are all excellent – will leave you smarter about the forces that shape our cities.
Sandoval-Strausz examines Latino neighborhoods in Chicago and Dallas to explain “How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City.” Along the way, he illuminates federal policies and private industries that together damaged cities. These include U.S. immigration policies that combined with economic conditions in Mexico and Central America to spur Latino immigration while creating obstacles to legal settlement within the U.S. Explaining everything from international labor flows to urban architectural styles to the politics of gentrification, Barrio America is also an implicit account of how Latinos became “white.” Also recommended is anything by Arlene Davila, whose specialty is understanding the implications of neoliberalism on Latino communities.
Starting around 70 years ago, white flight out of America's major cities caused rapid urban decline. Now we are witnessing a resurgence of American urbanism said to be the result of white people's return. But this account entirely passes over the stable immigrant communities who arrived and never left: as whites fled for the suburbs and exurbs in increasing numbers, Latin Americans immigrated to urban centres in even greater numbers. Barrio America charts the vibrant revival of American cities in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, arguing that we should attribute this revival to the influx of Latin American immigrants --…
I’m an urban planner and educator who is fascinated not just by cities and the experience of place, but also by the ideas and actions that go on “behind the scenes” in the planning of cities. Almost all US cities are guided by some sort of local plan and, while no plan is perfect, my hope is always that inclusive planning can help communities solve their problems to make any place a better place. I was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and have lived mostly in the eastern US – from Michigan to Alabama – where I'm constantly intrigued by the everyday “nooks and crannies” of the places and communities where I live, work, and play.
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.
Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive, and he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick. In this essential book, Speck reveals the invisible workings of the…
I’m deeply concerned about the health of the planet and am puzzled by our failure to act. As someone who thinks a lot about museums and heritage (aka the stories we tell about ourselves), I’m intrigued by how we think about places of environmental harm as heritage and how we pay attention to the environmental impact of heritage sites like WWI battlefields, English ironworks, and Appalachian coal mines. Interrogating what we remember and what we forget illuminates the systems of power that benefit from ignoring environmental and social costs. My hope is that understanding the history of toxic harm points us to a more sustainable, just future.
The authors examine urban environmental harm in three US cities and the environmental and social cost of growth.
The powerful takeaway is their explanation of why this harm remains largely hidden – the “churning” of industry and residential areas and the political incentives to reward short-term gain and ignore long-term costs.
Winner of the 2020 Robert E. Park Award for Best Book from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association
From a dive bar in New Orleans to a leafy residential street in Minneapolis, many establishments and homes in cities across the nation share a troubling and largely invisible past: they were once sites of industrial manufacturers, such as plastics factories or machine shops, that likely left behind carcinogens and other hazardous industrial byproducts. In Sites Unseen, sociologists Scott Frickel and James Elliott uncover the hidden histories of these sites to show how they are regularly produced…
