The most recommended books about urbanization

The key contribution of this book was the systemic understanding of cultural heritage. The collected articles and case studies represent a holistic and integrated concept of cultural heritage. Seeing cultural heritage as a social and political construct, as the authors describe it, opened the door for two new approaches:

First, the integration of different types of heritage that are usually treated separately, e.g., intangible heritage, tangible heritage, etc. And, second, starting to focus on the social parts of cultural heritage, basically the role of people. In my personal view all heritage is only relevant if it is relevant to people, and this book helped me to shape this conviction.

I truly admire how the author connects the different government levels and doesn't shy away from the obvious complexity this brings forward. This big-picture approach is a refreshing alternative to many case-focused articles and books and naturally speaks to my… show more.

There are lots of books about the stories newspapers published, but there are not so many books about what newspapers meant to people—and to the cities whose names they bore.

This book, which examines the press in four major U.S. cities around the turn of the 20th century, shows how newspapers helped Americans understand who they were in a modernizing country. I love that it doesn’t focus only on weighty national affairs and politics. Instead, Guarneri shows the influence the press had on things like gender roles, suburban growth, and social class.

The images alone—news stories, illustrations, and advertisements from the period—make this book so much fun to flip through. 

Here is the best introduction to how the Confederacy transformed itself into a mirror image of the South’s traditional portrayal as a static agricultural society based on states’ rights. To meet the demands of waging the Civil War, the Confederacy underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization directed by a strong centralized bureaucracy in Richmond. New and expanded roles opened up for southern women challenging the prerogatives of male patriarchy. How many of these changes would have become permanent had the Confederacy survived is an open question, but the Confederacy decidedly was not an extension of the Old South.

Hazan knows every nook and cranny of his city. He exults in the buildings and architecture, but his main subject is the people who wove the fabric of its diverse communities and their histories. He takes us on a historical journey that passes from the salons of the old aristocracy to the artisanal districts where popular, revolutionary activism was born. Hazan makes no attempt to conceal his left-wing sympathies, but he is equally at home admiring the Art Nouveau gems of the well-heeled 16th arrondissement as he is enjoying the vibrant, ethnically diverse northern districts of the city. Hazan’s love of the human life of Paris shines through.

The author takes us on a fascinating journey into one of the most mesmerizingly contradictory megalopolis of the world: Tehran, the capital city of Iran.

From the beautiful anecdotes about “nude watching” in the public baths of pre-modern Iran, to the hustle and bustle in the ultra-modern shopping malls of today, this book is an ode to Tehran and a complete guide into its labyrinthine political and social forces at the same time.

As a scholar, but also as someone who visited Tehran several times, this book will always be a reminder of why this place has had such a unique influence on so many people from East and West, North and South.

All the more, perhaps, because the book was preceded by tragedy as the young author died in an avalanche while mountain climbing at the tender age of 37.

This book revealed a pastoral Manhattan few of us could imagine, including feral pigs that roamed the streets, and horses that transported everything and everyone around town. Set in the transformative 1800s when New York City underwent unprecedented urbanization, this book shows how farmers and other New Yorkers who worked the land were ultimately squeezed from Manhattan for more profitable tenants, and how Central Park, and other open spaces, sought to replicate all that recently displaced nature.   

This is a landmark book that provides an interdisciplinary and global analysis of the 20th-century cities. 

Graham and Marvin conceive the city as a flow process, and they examine the networked infrastructure of cities such as transport, communication, energy, water, and street networks.

What I like about this book is that it helps readers to understand the complexity and the sociotechnical processes of modern cities by using urban network infrastructure and providing examples across scales from local to global examples. This book also shows us how to approach modern cities with an interdisciplinary approach by using social theories such as actor-network theory, political economy, and relational theories. 

A rich historical account of the experiences of Afghans living in urban Pakistan from the 1970s to the post-2001 ‘War on Terror’ period, this book provides a fascinating discussion of urban informality, what it means to belong, the role of citizenship, and the engagement and absence of the state in cities.

The book utilises ethnographic observations and interviews but also valuable archival data–raising important considerations of who gets remembered, as well as underscoring that urban refugees are not a new phenomenon. 

The monuments we see when we visit Rome were constructed under the emperors. But Rome was already a great metropolis before they began work, one that was architecturally unique and built on a scale to dwarf most ancient cities. What this book does is reconstruct the great building projects of the Republic, beginning with the original fourth-century walls of Rome and the first aqueducts. It asks (and answers) questions like: Where did they get the stone? Who provided the labour? How long did it take them? And what technologies did they use? This was a Rome built without marble, without concrete, and not a royal foundation, but one managed by generations of magistrates riding the wave of a slow economic boom. Completely fascinating.

Laporte’s poetic and sweeping tour of turds made me realize how flushing my toilet produces and reinscribes cultural norms. Read the history behind our collective fascination with “sewer stories,” whether it’s London’s immense blobs of underground fat or urban legends about deadly crocodiles or mutant goldfish. 

I love how this book has inspired and influenced contemporary metabolic artists. In 2017, Kathy High and Guy Schaffer created a mixed media project “committed to re-imaging and re-inserting feminist and queer stories into our histories of medicine and science” and called their work History of Shit as an homage to Laporte. I am moved by how High and Schaffer continue Laporte’s work within what might have been his natural lifespan had we not lost him and countless artists and philosophers to the AIDS pandemic.