The following comment operates on the assumption that you are interested in American urban planning from an administrative or public policy focus. For real estate development, urban design/architecture, or international issues, look elsewhere.

A solid, all purpose undergraduate major: philosophy. You can teach yourself subjects and even methods, but to learn how to think critically and write about complex subjects in a clear way you need quality, focused instruction and that's the purpose of philosophy. Outside of your general major requirements, take exclusively analytic philosophy courses. Typically there is an analytic philosophy survey course but for other courses identify which professors in your department operate in this tradition (and take teaching seriously) and take whatever courses they offer, regardless of your personal interest in the subject going in. Common subjects include logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, epistemology, etc. These courses will discipline your thinking and writing in ways that other majors won't. These skills are absolutely fundamental and lay the groundwork for a successful, highly adaptable career.

Outside of that major, which will fulfill your humanities requirements, you should fill your general requirements with courses like U.S. government (typically fulfilling a social science requirement), microeconomics and macroeconomics (social science, business, and occasionally quantitative), and environmental science (natural science). Take as many economics courses as you can. You can also take a basic geography course focused on cities but in my experience these courses teach you what you can easily learn from disciplined study on your own time. Focus your electives on methods courses, specifically statistics and digital mapping (GIS). You can also easily learn these online but if you have to fill up requirements, stick with these.

"But wait, don't I need to know something about urban planning?" Definitely! But you don't need to use up valuable course time on this subjects unless you have top urban planning scholars teaching undergraduate courses at your school, which probably isn't the case. Feel free to share your program and I'm sure the great community here can point out any top scholars active there. Otherwise, focus on teaching yourself the subject over summer and winter breaks. Read books by esteemed experts/scholars/writers in the field. A few broad essentials, all of which should be available at your public library:

• "Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (the essential urban planning text)
  
  
• "Triumph of the City" by Edward Glaeser (urban economics)
  
  
• "Zoned in the USA" by Sonia Hirt (land use planning)
  
  
• "Walkable City" by Jeff Speck (transportation/urban design)
  
  
• "Cities of Tomorrow" by Peter Hall (urban theory/history - don't hesitate to save a ton of money by buying an older edition!)
  
  Other users are welcome to contribute what they see as essentials. The key here is to read about urban planning relentlessly in your free time (important: this includes blogs!) and focus your coursework on skills development. This combination of philosophy/methods coursework and disciplined, independent reading will make you not only an issue expert, which are a dime a dozen, but a productive expert, someone who can approach a completely new problem and produce useful results.
  
  This is the path I have followed and I have been happy with the results. Hope this helps.
  
  Edit: grammar errors, typos, etc. fixes.

Hah. It's complicated. I don't think there is such a list. If you build your list purely by data, let's say population or wealth, it doesn't work. Seattle, or San Francisco, which to me are T1 cities, have smaller populations than Houston, Texas, which to me is a T2 (despite being one of the biggest cities in the country).

To me, a Tier 1 city is typically one people outside of the country have heard of. New York. Boston. SF. LA. Seattle. Chicago. When I visited Paris and told people (a cab driver and a worker at a bakery) I was from New Orleans, I shit you not, they had never heard of it. I had to say, "Louis Armstrong? Jazz?" and that gave them sort of a light bulb...

A Tier 1 city has everything you expect. Density of population, residential and commercial spaces in close proximity. Insane traffic. Wealth. The aforementioned things to do. Tier 2 cities tend to be more spread out, like Houston or Atlanta (but, again, LA is insanely spread out so you can't judge cities by density, either), and they tend to have sleepier commercial activity (most stores or restaurants downtown shut down around 5-6 or are only open for lunch).

They tend to have some wealth but not crazy wealth. Charlotte, NC is flush with bank money (I think). Houston and Dallas with energy. Miami with tourism and probably drugs, I dunno. Someone mentioned Boise, I think Boise has been home to a tech scene for a long time but it hasn't ever put the city on much of a map. Oddly I was driving cross country and went past Boise and it looks absolutely miniscule, like a small town that's really proud of having a couple 50 story buildings in it. Not hating, just an example of a place having a bigger reputation than it should.

You might find this book helpful: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. I read this early on while hunting for a place to live because I wanted to really understand how to recognize a great city without having to visit many of them. I ended up traveling a lot anyway but her work is very insightful. She was instrumental in how Toronto evolved (she even had an impact on New York I believe) and I briefly lived in a neighborhood with her fingerprints all over it, that was essentially her model neighborhood. A perfect blend of medium density residential (some single family homes next to 20-30 unit apartment buildings a few blocks deep) astride a commercial corridor for groceries and entertainment -- the neighborhood is called "The Annex", check it out on Google Street view here. The neighborhood has a mix of students, professors, bankers, artists, etc. Or, it had -- I'm sure it is gentrified like crazy by now.

A Tier 1 city is also a city that is insanely expensive to live in. In San Francisco I rented a 330 sq. ft. apartment in a truly awful neighborhood for $1650/month five years ago. That was a great price back then...in New Orleans I had a 1300 sq. ft. house and was paying the equivalent of $800/month in mortgage. I paid the place off just before I moved away from there, something I never thought I'd be able to do in my lifetime. It is something I will never likely be able to do in a Tier 1 city.

So...probably more of an answer than you wanted or expected, and probably not a very helpful one. My suggestion is to think about what is important to you and find a place that has that. Do you love the outdoors? Denver/Boulder, Portland OR, Seattle, etc. are great cities with that. Do you want to spend tons of time at a beach? San Diego is pretty affordable (for California) and you get that. Do you like hiking and camping? Plenty of places to do that in texas. Find a subreddit here and ask the locals :)

I spent my senior year of high school studying gentrification and demographic patterns in the District for my senior thesis and used these three sources extensively, they're superb books that are great reads for anyone even remotely interested in the District. They're pretty pricey to buy, but DCPL has each book, and the last one is available for Kindle.

City of Magnificent Intentions is an amazing book. It's the DCPS textbook for D.C. History (mandatory to graduate high school) and is filled with great facts, photos and drawings. Although it's formatted like a textbook, it is still a fantastic history of the city. It does a great job addressing planning and general demographics. It's probably one of the best books on D.C.

Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. is a fascinating read on the politics and racial history of the District, and it's co-authored by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood! It has a great section on the riots, how they affected the District, and the rise (and I believe also the fall) of Marion Barry.

The Great Society Subway is an incredibly detailed history of Metro, but might also interest you based on the way it details the impact it made on various sections of the city and suburbs (For instance, it goes in depth about how the green line was the last line built and how that impacted the neighborhoods it passed through, often the poorest in the city).

I totally love the Christopher Alexander books. Definitely check out his The Timeless Way of Building which is a great companion piece to A Pattern Language. You should know that his works, while great in my opinion, are sort of considered idiosyncratic and not really in the mainstream of architecture/urban design.

Here's a short reading list you should look at:

The Smart Growth Manual and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany & Jeff Speck. Another set of sort-of-companion works, the Manual has a concrete set of recommendations inspired by the critique of modern town planning in Suburban Nation and might be more useful for your purposes.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous and influential book on city planning ever and contains a lot of really original and thoughtful insights on cities. Despite being over half-a-century old it feels very contemporary and relevant.

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is similarly mostly a critique of modernist planning principles but is both short and very well written so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski: I can't recommend this entire book, but it does contain (in my opinion) the best summary of the history of American urban planning. Really useful for a historical perspective on different schools of thought in city design over the years.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup is the book on parking policy. It's huge (700+ pages) and very thorough and academic, so it might be harder to get through than the other, more popular-audience-oriented titles on the list, but if you want to include parking as a gameplay element, I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a problem that's thorny enough most city games just ignore it entirely: Simcity2013's developers say they abandoned it after realizing it would mean most of their players' cities would be covered in parking lots, ignoring that most actual American cities are indeed covered in parking lots.

Finally there's a bunch of great blogs/websites out there you should check out: Streetsblog is definitely a giant in transportation/design blogging and has a really capable team of journalists and a staggering amount of content. Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns blog and Podcast are a great source for thinking about these issues more in terms of smaller towns and municipalities (in contrast to Streetsblog's focus on major metropolitan areas). The Sightline Daily's blog does amazing planning/transpo coverage of the Pacific Northwest. Finally [The Atlantic Cities] (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/) blog has incredible coverage on city-issues around the world.

I hope this was helpful and not overwhelming. It's a pretty big (and in my opinion, interesting) topic, so there's a lot of ground to cover even in an introductory sense.

It's something I've adapted from a few sources on urban planning/design. It's something I never thought about until recently, but the way we build places can have a huge effect on the people who live in them. Personally, I noticed that I was always happier in cities where I could walk around and see other people walking around, versus when I was in small towns where I had to drive to get to anything. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, exactly, until I was in college and got to read Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities. Suddenly it all started to make sense.

If you're interested in learning more, check out New Urbanism, r/urbanplanning, and maybe a good book on the subject, like Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. This is a great place to start, it highlights some common problems in our current building patterns and pulls examples from all over the world to show ways that work better and help build happier places.

Some other good reads:

• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
  
  
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
  
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The last excellent work of fiction I read was City of Dreams by Beverly Swerling. The book that I feel best captures the feeling of New York City, however, is Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin.

I mostly read nonfiction books about New York City history, and I'll share a few of my favorites with you. The definitive tome, of course, is Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows. Another favorite of mine, as I love the history of New Amsterdam, is Island at the Center of the World:The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto. One of the most fascinating subjects I have been learning about is Native American history at the period of first European contact, and I really recommend checking out Adriaen Van Der Donck's A Description of New Netherland (The Iroquoians and their World), which many scholars agree is just as much of a significant work as William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, and would be the definitive guide to the new world if it had been written in English. Evan Pritchard's Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquian People of New York also offers an incredible look at native culture.

If you are interested in the subway system, check out Stan Fischler's fantastic Uptown, Downtown. One of the most underrated books I have picked up recently explores the construction of the amazing Grand Central Terminal, and I learned an incredible amount from it: Grand Central's Engineer: William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan. If you are interested in urban planning, I would also suggest The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor.

At this point I've read a ton of nonfiction books about the city, so if you have any questions or want any other recommendations, feel free to ask!

Great question, and great idea! Off the top of my head:


The Basics

Landscape Architect's Portable Handbook - This one does get a bit technical, but it's a good guide.


Sociology/Psychology

Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - Just a good book about how people experience spaces

Design with People in Mind - An older film, but a classic. Funny and with great observations about how people use spaces and interact with their environment


Design Theory

Architecture: Form, Space and Order - This is a great guidebook for architects and landscape architects alike


History of Landscape Architecture

Illustrated History of Landscape Design - A great intro to the history of landscape architecture.


Urban Planning/Design

Death and Life of Great American Cities - It's a classic and should be a required read for anyone in landscape architecture or architecture


This is the short list - I'll add to it as I think of more!

Woah, easy killer.

Look I get what you're saying. Highways and wide lanes seem like sexy things. That's exactly what I used to think as well before I started learning about urban planning and transit design. There's a lot of intricacies about it but here's some good beginner stuff

First, check out r/urbanplanning. Super interesting sub about the city ecosystem and how to design a successful city.


Books:

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs. Basically the bible of city design.

"Walkable City" by Jeff Speck is also an awesome book. That guy is a great presenter as well

Videos:

How Highways Wrecked American Cities

Why Public Transportation Sucks in the US

Why Trains Suck in America

How Closing Roads Could Speed Up Traffic - The Braess Paradox

How to Fix Traffic Forever

Presentations:

Basically any presentation by Jeff Speck

What it boils down to, is you destroy the urban environment by introducing cars. They take up so much room that can be used for dense development but requiring parking sports and wide streets.

Great representation of what car do to cities

This is my last comment here. I can't argue with someone about urban development/planning if they haven't studied the topic themselves. It's a topsy-turvey thing to us living in the post automobile United States, but it makes sense after you do some research.

Enjoy!

Thanks for the tips! The pie shakes at Hamburg Inn sound amazing. I actually just caved in tonight and got a burger/shake combo after a week of eating healthy...

As far as recommendations go, I have a feeling you've likely read most of the fiction I'd suggest. That said, here's a couple non-fiction suggestions you might not have read:

Walkable City, by Jeff Speck. If you've ever been interested in cities, what makes them work (or not work), and what types of decisions urban planners make, check it out. It's a quick read, entertaining, and you'll never see your city or any other city in the same way.

Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick. Told primarily through the eyes of two people, this book provides readers with a glimpse of what life is like for the millions of ordinary North Korean citizens.

Anyway, I know it's well past the time frame for your AMA, but if you get a chance, I'd love to know if there's any one book that helped you the most as a writer (e.g. King's, "On Writing"), or any one piece of advice that has carried you the most. I don't ever plan on writing professionally, but I've always wanted to write a novel just for the satisfaction of creating something, regardless if anyone actually reads it. I just feel like I spend so much time consuming things others have created, while creating nothing in return. Plus, getting 'lost in a world you're creating' sounds immensely satisfying.

One thing that I'd urge him to consider if he's serious about this is that the areas of Detroit that are doing best are the ones that are walkable (namely, Midtown and Downtown), and based on this streetview of Dexter and Davison, it's very, very much not walkable.

There are a few really great books on how you can start to make an area walkable: Walkable City by Jeff Speck was the first one that I read. I'd love to read more about a real strategy to make this the sort of place that people really want to live in, but that's a really, really hard job and is going to require some very deliberate execution.

A few steps that I believe would help a lot, all of which are pretty hard:

• Identify one or two adjacent areas of the neighborhood that already receive the most foot traffic. These are the areas you're going to improve.
  
• Work with the city to narrow the roads in these areas. People don't feel safe walking next to an eight lane road.
  
• Find one or two anchor tenants that will get people to come to the area. Something equivalent to what Craftwork and Sister Pie were for West Village.
  
• Make sure that any new development in the area makes things more walkable, not less. He mentions a new Flagstar bank, but if that new bank takes up too much space, it's going to disincentivize people from walking because banks aren't interesting to walk by compared to, say, a shoe shop with a display in the window or a pastry shop. (See Walkable City or Jane Jacobs's writing about how too many banks is actually a sign of an area becoming less walkable. I can't remember which.)
  
• Make sure that the area is as well connected to other already-walkable areas of town as possible.
  
  I know a lot of this probably sounds like "Shit, this guy is just trying to make his rough neighborhood better and might not have a ton of money to do it. How can you expect him to do this stuff?" This stuff is not easy, though: if it were, there would be a hell of a lot more walkable areas in Detroit. The fact of the matter is that you don't fix the city by making it look more like the suburbs, and his suggestions of adding a CVS, Aldi, Comerica, and Flagstaff don't make me terribly optimistic that he understands the factors that are making other areas attractive.

Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City: How Downtown can Save America, One Step at a Time”” is a personal favorite. He quotes his work in Lowell, MA throughout the book.

I’ve also been recommended to read Cheryl Heller’s “The Intergalactic Design Guide: Harnessing the Creative Potential of Social Design” and while I haven’t yet had the chance to pick it up, I think it might be up the alley of what you’re looking for.

I’m halfway through James and Deborah Fallows’ “Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America” which is also excellent, and provides a great set of case studies in urban revitalization.

My own masters practica (in Emergency management) is on creating greater access to healthcare via some urban planning interventions in a similar New England city, if not the same one.

I’m local to Boston, and would be happy to loan you the first and last books, should you be interested.

Cheers!

Unpopular opinion here but Earth Hour is not only misleading, it actually gives people a false concept of sustainability.

This American urban planner pulled some of the latest research and found that someone who lives in a super "green" suburban house and drives to it in a hybrid car still produces more carbon emissions than someone who lives in an old house downtown but doesn't drive as much because they can walk or use transit.

Our built environment (i.e. whether you have to drive for every daily task or not) is a real driver of sustainability, not light bulbs or appliances. Plus light bulbs are improving anyways as LED bulbs are becoming more popular and they use very little energy so turning them off for hour almost accomplishes nothing.

Earth Hour essentially tells people it is okay if you live in a McMansion in the deepest of suburban sprawl and burn fuel to drive to pick up even a carton of orange juice - as long as you just turn off a few bulbs once a year. It makes people feel good and ignore the true causes of their carbon footprint. This isn't a call to live like a hippie. It's a call for better urban planning with less sprawl, more transit, and more walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods.

> Are you against people choosing to live in suburbs if they pay the full cost of doing so? ie: transportation & other infrastructure requirements

Why do you ask? Because as things stand, the cost of infrastructure and transportation is heavily socialized. And that is not even taking into account the significant externalities imposed by a sprawled, highway-heavy suburb on the environment as well as traffic problems into whatever city such highways end up in.

Even if suburban residents actually paid these cost (and I would argue that aforementioned externalities make this almost completely impractical), you still have to deal with the fact that adding to highway capacity actually makes traffic worse, not better.

People will bear a particular commute until the point at which it becomes... unbearable (duh). So because suburban living is attractive (which I'm not denying), not to mention almost always cheaper (at least to the individual) people will keep moving into the suburbs so long as their commute is still bearable, until eventually it isn't. Then they demand more highways, and the cycle repeats, though the actual commercial center of the city where everyone is going hasn't necessarily changed, so it's actually much, much harder to cram all these extra people in via highway after each cycle.

My favorite author on this topic is (Jane Jacobs)[http://www.amazon.ca/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0679600477] - she made some remarkably accurate predictions about the problems with highway-based sprawl and her arguments have not aged one bit.

>I believe he is referring to research showing that up to now, higher density cities with extensive transit have failed to improve commute times as too many people who live in condos end up driving to work anyways.

What research is that?? All the obvious super-dense residential cities (New York, San Fran, even Vancouver) have excellent ridership figures for public transit.

>Most jobs in a city are in the suburbs, so there is a lot of cross city travel that people use their cars for.

This isn't quite true - at the very least you'd have to agree that city centers have a much higher concentration (per capita, not square mile) of jobs. Think downtowns and commercial districts.

Other then heavy industry (which has been on the decline for a while now in terms of employment), most jobs in the suburbs are caused by office parks which basically come to exist the exact same way residential suburban development happens (cheap land, free highways, woo!), just for commercial tenants. Anything you do to one happens to the other.

> I would expect this should change as self-driving cars are implemented and road capacity doubles or more. High-speed trains of cars will be able to zip through cities.

But that's the point! We dont' have self-driving cars today (and probably not for a while) - but we DO have self-driving trains, as well as trams and elevated rail and subways and ferries and car coops and taxis and bike lanes.

I am sympathetic towards the argument that punishing people for driving is not a good way to encourage public transit use. The much better way is to simply provide better public transit. European cities make great use of transit and ridership is high throughout social classes.

> It goes without saying that housing affordability goes down as density goes up. At the moment, it's still cheaper overall to build low density 2-story houses out of wood than high density steel & concrete buildings.

But again, this is simply by virtue of the numerous externalities that you can get away with for single family homes. They are cheaper to build, yes, but are they actually more affordable to live in once you consider the cost of transport, the cost of providing public and civil services and so forth?


I should probably also mention that I'm not against suburbs as an idea, only against highway-based suburbs. "Street car suburbs" are actually quite sustainable and can contain their costs much more effectively. Ever watch Mad Men? Don Draper lives in the idyllic suburban wonderland of the 60s, but even he usually takes the train to work.

There are plenty of "healthy" suburbs to be found if you look for them. They maintain a pleasant low-density lifestyle but also introduce mixed-use blocks and localized medium-density "mini-downtowns". If you just want to do some shopping or go see a movie (or go to school) you can get by with walking, bus/trams or biking but you definitely have to take a commuter train to work. And of course all of this still combines just fine with occasional car use, which is now far less painful since you aren't perpetually filling up the streets to the point of unbearability.

Firstly on the resources for Urban planning. Well. Honestly, I haven't personally great online resources for learning about Urban planning. Various government institutions have released master plans and design guide documents (almost all are pretty boring). Your best bet (unfortunately) is in buying expensive books online and getting it shipped to you. There are plenty of great planning books for the European context. Particularly urban design books.

https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/wiki/readinglist Is worth a look at. (most are american focuses of course)

I think these might be useful to you.

https://www.amazon.com/City-Reader-5th-Routledge-Urban/dp/0415556651

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Land-Planning-Alan-Evans/dp/140511861X

https://www.amazon.com/Urban-Economics-Arthur-OSullivan/dp/0073511471

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Streets-Press-Allan-Jacobs/dp/0262600234/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536125765&sr=8-1&keywords=great+streets

​

On the green space/parking. Well firstly it really depends on:

A) what is the land parcel you already own here. Who owns the petrol station? What is the minimum set back from the Ma-6014 road?

B) What kind of funding do you have? Are you using a loan?

C) what are your zoning and planning powers here?

D) how many cars do you need to accommodate and how much of the parking share would be given for free and how will you pay for that (will the foreign parking pay for it? Will you need general revenue or will you lease out some land for commercial purposes to cover costs -and do you have the power to do that) -I'm personally against free parking but i get it's appeal and use as a planning tool-.

E) What kind of services does your town lack? Child care? Library (if within your level of government)? Flexible community space (i.e cheaply rent-able rooms for hire by community groups)?

F) What's the parking for anyway? Do people drive to your town to go to the beach (will it compete with the beach front parking)? Or do people use the town as a dormitory suburb for Parma and is that is why people park there? Will people be using the car park all the time? On the weekends? Mornings and at night in the week days?

​

Other random observations:

-How much demand is there fore more green space? The town seems to be pretty well provisioned with public space (even if there isn't much 'green' public space). There's also near by natural reserve.

-There's a lack of street trees east of the supermarket and police station.

- Whats up with the fence around the main park? For the children?

-From an urban design perspective, everything around that park is such a missed opportunity.

> The biggest difference is that I would be prouder of an architectural degree since it's harder to acquire and is viewed as more ambitious.

Put that thought aside for a while and try to figure out what type of career you're are interested in. I'm mainly thinking job functions and project types here. Then trace back from that to figure out which of the two are better suited for bringing you on that path (knowing that they probably both can if you change your mind later). Is it the specific site layout or the strategic planning vision that has your main interest?

Also, try to figure out what your primary interest in planning is. Real estate? Public spaces? Transportation? Fostering livable cities through mobility planning, promoting bicycling, converting surface parking into greenspaces or squares, etc. is a rising agenda in many cities for example. If that has your interest you can mold either of the two in a way that takes you in that direction (and reading Cities for People will be a good place to start).

In my experience people don't care too much about your educational background once you've landed your first job. From there on its all about what you've worked with.

edit: words and stuff

I won't, but I will give you several sites and subreddits you should check out.

/r/urbanplanning

/r/urbandesign

/r/urbantransport

/r/highspeedrail

/r/transit

Congress for the New Urbanism

Congress for the New Urbanism's YouTube Channel

Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (planning firm)

Smart Growth Online

NewUrbanism.org

Strong Towns YouTube Channel

Notre Dame School of Architecture YouTube Channel

_____

Here are also some good book recommendations (links to Amazon pages), many you could probably find at a local library:

A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburb by Philip Langdon

The Architecture of Community by Leon Krier

Architecture: Choice or Fate by Leon Krier

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch

The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon

Sprawl Repair Manual by Galina Tachieva

Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany

History of Urban Form Before the Industrial Revolutions by A.E.J. Morris

The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary by Dhiru A. Thadani

It is.

If you're interested in the design of the DC Metro system I strongly recommend the only book on the subject, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro. This book is fascinating and offers really good history and explanation of why things on DC Metro are as they are, including why there is carpet in the cars, why you don't see bathrooms in the stations (they are there!), and more.

Excellent read!

MONDAY

I highly recommend 1984 by George Orwell if you haven't read it. I know it's a classic, but many people still haven't read it. It's by far my favorite book of all time.

I would love Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

Thanks for the contest!

Neat question. The two obvious big names from Urban Planning are Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. They epitomize Modernist planning and Post-Modern planning, respectively.

Robert Moses was one of the most important non-elected officials in the 20th Century, with the most popular account being Robert Caro's massive biography, The Power Broker. He was a fantastically smart legal wiz who came to power in the 1920s in New York and was the standard-bearer for sweeping top-down government approaches to development. He used his knowledge and authority to gain more and more power, creating some of the first modern highways in bridges all over New York City and state that helped influence the Interstate Highway Act and the urban car-centric model.

He can be viewed as quite a villain these days (think the unbridled power of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons), especially as academic planners now generally recognize the huge negative impacts that Modernist American planning had. There was massive economic and social displacement where things like the Cross Bronx Expressway ripped working-class immigrant neighborhoods in half, allowing commerce to escape urban centers and help create mid-century ghettoization. In short, the modernist approach can be seen as paternalistic at best and willfully concentrating power at the expense of the masses at worst. That said, depression-Era New York had huge problems (dilapidated housing and political corruption, to name two) that Moses' public works projects helped alleviate, and he was one of the country's most powerful advocates for public parks even in the face of massive growth and sprawl.

Moses sat on countless commissions and authorities for decades, his power only finally waning in the 1960s as the top-down modernist approach of (Post) World War II America faced its loudest criticisms with the related Civil Rights, Hippie, Environmentalist, Anti-Vietnam movements: Americans were finally scrutinizing the "Build Build Build Cars Cars Cars Roads Roads Roads" model that had driven cities for decades, which brings us to Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs (who got herself a Google Doodle last week for her 100th birthday), was a Greenwich Village liberal and fierce critic of the Moses-type technocratic planning. She was a community organizer who helped stop Moses as he tried to push through plans for highways in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. For those unfamiliar, these are two of the economic and social cores of New York City - she argued that roads are supposed to serve us, not destroy our important urban spaces.

If you ask a city planner what sole city planning book to read (myself included), the overwhelming favorite will be Jacobs' 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the most important critique of modernist planning to date. Instead of sprawling highways and engineering projects, Jacobs saw the healthiest urban spaces as walkable, intimate, friendly and inviting and on a human-scale. She advocated for small city blocks, much wider sidewalks and mixed-use spaces instead of the classic Sim City "Residential/Commercial/Industrial" segregated zoning.

While there has since been plenty of critique of Jacobs' post-modern model, today's planning leans much closer to Jacobs' vision (at least in academic settings): Planners are more focused than ever on the post-modern walkability, mixed-use, high-density, equal-access, participatory planning model. Although this seems like a healthier place for planning than the Moses model of old, the academic ideals clash with the huge legacy of the Modernist planning approach (We can't just up and rebuild cities every time a theory changes, after all), along with the neoliberal financialization and privatization of so many of our spaces over the last few decades, so it's still as muddy as ever.

Anyway, that's a slight oversimplification of some of the history, but Moses and Jacobs were certainly the biggest avatars of the Modernist and Post-Modernist planning movements and have been as influential in the field of planning as anybody.

I think I get what you're saying - you wish /r/urbanplanning would acknowledge the fact that we have suburbs and post more things like the Build a Better Burb design challenge for Long Island, which does still endorse many of the things that do get discussed and posted here on the subreddit, like better transit access, increasing density (the slippery slope argument against density is that we want skyscrapers...), and improving a sense of place.

I'll definitely say that there's a lot to be had from the influence of land-use policies that could be changed to encourage transformations of suburbs to European-like strong towns linked by rail with greenspace in between, as is discussed in this article. However, a lot of these ideas aren't as easily applied elsewhere in US suburbs where suburbs came in after the decline of the railroads; Long Island is unique in its mostly electrified commuter rail services and lends itself better toward the idealistic transmogrification we'd love to see across the US. Perhaps this is the space of the discussion you're looking for?

On top of that, you still do have the issue that people do live in the suburbs for one or more of the features one finds/expects to find there. Actual implementation of land use policy can be very difficult when dealing with many individual property owners, even if those policies encourage the improvement of transport access, community amenities, public spaces, etc.

I've always been intrigued by the book Retrofitting Suburbia but haven't pulled the trigger on buying the book yet - I'm still going through the Shoup bible and my signed copy of Triumph of the City.

Human Transit and Trains, Buses, People (written by a professor of transportation at Rice University) are excellent introductions to transportation. Jarret Walker, author of Human transit, also has a blog he updates quite frequently. Strong Towns has a biking and parking section of their blog and an editorial called Ask R. Moses that has questions answered by civil engineers, typically professionals that run transportation. NACTO also has an excellent guide in urban bike transportation for something specific that we're using for a bike-ped class this semester.


As you explore these topics you'll start to find organizations like NACTO and people like Jarret Walker you'll be able to find webinars and youtube videos as well as additional reading material to fill in those gaps.


If you want something truly academic, I have a pdf of a textbook I used in my transportation fundamentals class last semester I'm happy to email you if you'll DM me.

Personally, I don't think a full repeal to all of the residential zoning is the best practice. A full repeal would likely only increase land values
(here's a good explainer as to how that can happen). I do believe they need to be loosened significantly. At the rate this city is growing, it needs to have all of the tools necessary to help increase density and banning thing such as having both an ADU and DADU on single family lots and requiring their sizes to be such that they cannot accommodate families is a bad thing. Duplexes and triplexes also should be legal in single family zones. These allowances also should be paired with strategic rezones that allow for some sort of corner market/commerce zone within a 5-10 minute walkshed of every house in SFZs in order to make it reasonable for people in SFZs to live without a car in these now densified neighborhoods.


In regards to more reading: are you looking for more reading regarding Seattle zoning law exclusively or are you looking for reading recommendations that follow an urbanist bent? For Seattle specific stuff, The Urbanist and Seattle Transit Blog post a lot regarding land use in the city. If you are looking for books that talk about general city planning the gold standard is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I personally really enjoyed Walkable City, Suburban Nation, and Happy City.

Interaction Design

• About Face 3 by Alan Cooper
  
• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
  
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
  
• Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin
  
• Making Things Talk: (2011) (2007) by Tom Igoe
  
  Interior Design
  
  
• The Decoration of Houses by Edith Wharton and Ogden, Jr. Codman
  
• Domino: The Book of Decorating by Deborah Needleman
  
• Design*Sponge at Home: A Guide to Inspiring Homes by Grace Bonney
  
• The Vintage/Modern Home by Katherine Sorrell
  
• The Fundamentals of Interior Design by Simon Dodsworth
  
  Landscape Architecture
  
  
• Landscape Architectural Graphic Standards by Leonard J. Hopper
  
• Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
  
• Landscape Graphics by Grant W. Reid
  
• Cities for People by Jan Gehl
  
• Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg
  
  Lighting Design
  
  
• Stage Lighting Design by Richard Pilbrow
  
• The Architecture of Natural Light by Henry Plummer
  
• Painting With Light by John Alton
  
• Made of Light by Anthony Tischhauser
  
• Color, Environment and Human Response by Frank H. Mahnke & Rudolf H. Mahnke
  
  Product Design
  
  
• Sketching: Drawing Techniques from Product Designers by Koos Eissen
  
• Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek
  
• The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
  
• Mythologies by Roland Barthes
  
• Cradle to Cradle. Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
  
  Product Design
  
  
• In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World by John Thackara
  
• The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore
  
• Universal Methods of Design by Bruce Hanington & Bella Martin
  
• Cradle to Cradle. Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
  
• Mental Models by Indi Young
  
  Sound Design
  
  
• Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema by David Sonnenschein
  
• Designing Sound by Andy Farnell
  
• Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Michel Chion
  
• The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers
  
• Sound Theory Sound Practice by Rick Altman
  
  Urban Design
  
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
  * Cities for People by Jan Gehl
  
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
  
• The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler
  
• The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
  
  Web Design
  
  
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
  
• HTML & CSS: Design and Build Web Sites by Jon Duckett
  
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird
  
• Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS by Ben Frain
  
• Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke
  

For every dollar spent on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure you get a twenty dollar return. What that looks like is an uptick in vitality and health, less emergency rooms visits (as a result of increased cardio vascular health and the downstream impacts of being in the sun like combatting depression and increasing testosterone), less pollution and car accidents, and more people going at a slower rate actually taking in the surroundings, just to name a few positive benefits.

Funnily enough people going slower in the neighborhood (whether its urban downtown or suburbs) has an enormous impact psychologically, and that can be understood by anyone who always rides and decides to go for a walk, if that person then operates a motor vehicle less and chooses to commute via bicycle the impact is all the larger. Simply saying that you don't understand or see how it was worth it doesn't speak to the fiscal responsibility of the expenditure but the ignorance you have regarding the whole picture.

If you'd actually like to have a conversation about this I'd like for you to spend some time reading and watching a few videos.

The idea of cycling and pedestrian centric infrastructure and how it became so prevalent in modern planning.

Health and safety an abstract of a study with cycling. I'd link to dozens if I thought you'd actually read them but here is at least one that is relatively short and simple to understand.

Why prioritizing walking and cycling is important for the future of urban design and the health and wellbeing of society.

There are a great many resources if you're actually curious and wondering whether or not that strip of bike lane was worth it. If you're looking at it in terms of a single neighborhood or even just a city, that's a bit narrow, and you should maybe take that 10,000ft birds eye view of things.

Absolutely, yes. :)

Have you seen the Sprawl Repair Manual? It's a book that outlines an interesting US-originated approach to fixing some of this mess (and thus seems to be like it would apply better here to our existing land-use than any European guide).

I often wonder (as I sit annoyed at one red light after another on Merivale) what it would take to convert the whole length to a UK-style dual-carriageway with roundabouts at the major intersections and all left-turns removed in between. You want to turn left? Go to the next roundabout, loop around, and come back on the other side of the median. This won't help the walkability much, mind you, only the driveability, but I think that the walkability of Merivale is a completely lost cause anyway. Adding segregated cycle tracks could improve the two-wheeled experience, too. Imagine Merivale without a single light from Baseline to Hunt Club: it could not possibly be worse! :)

Actually, for a local example of getting it right, check out Blvd des Allumettières in Gatineau: a dual-carriageway with roundabouts keeps the through flow-rate high, and that means that the road can be narrower as there's no need to store loads of stationary vehicles at each intersection. This also makes it friendlier to cross as a pedestrian. They've also got a segregated cycle track running parallel but at some distance to the road: nicely done.

Excellent. Thanks.

Here are the Amazon links for those books for anyone interested.

• The High Cost of Free Parking (Paper book only)
  
• Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile (Kindle and paper book)
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Paper book only)
  
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Kindle and paper book)
  
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (Kindle and paper book)
  
• The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World (Kindle and paper book)
  
• $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better (Kindle and paper book)

I'm very inspired by Jane Jacobs, organic growth, and "density done right." I want to see more growth driven by the market, so long as those who are receiving the benefit are the ones paying the cost. The more choice, the better. I oppose Ward 11 communities having to subsidize growth on the outskirts of the city.

In Calgary, we see a focus on commuting people into a planned downtown core. Allowing more employment/education/housing options elsewhere enables a multitude of transportation options besides driving - if you so choose.

In this exact order:

1. Start with Suburban Nation by Duany, Zyberk, and Speck. It's super easy to read, totally skimmable, and has a lot of great graphics and diagrams that help explain things. It's not the deepest book out there, but it's the best place to start.
   
   
2. After that, try Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler. The author can be cranky and there are no diagrams, but he does a nice job of explaining how suburbia happened, why it made sense at the time, and why it's not so great anymore. Basically it's a primer on the key issue facing city planning today.
   
   
3. After them, you'll be ready for The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs. This is the bible of urbanism, the most important and influential book written about the form of cities since the invention of the car. But it's not as accessible as the first two, so I wouldn't start here.
   
   
4. Walkable City by Speck. This is the newest of the bunch, and provides the data to back up the claims from the previous 3.
   
   
5. Image of the City by Lynch. This one is a series of case studies that will teach you how to "read" how a city functions based on its form. The examples are all woefully obsolete, which is too bad, but still teaches you an important skill.

the below is a bit disjointed and more like a ELI10, but based on real life ppl I know:

Paying a lot more than you needed to for something is always a bad idea, whatever its for (unless helping a friend with some new business, like buying overpriced breakfast at their new cafe).

Too many ppl think that if you bought a house to live in it doesn't matter what you paid for it since 30yrs later it should be worth more anyways. From a non-Australian perspective, this is sheer madness, and for me a great illustration of how masses of ppl just buy into bad ideas.

A real, concrete, very hard to deal with issue with overpaying for housing is that lots of ppl did so at the extreme utter super duper maximum of what they could conceivably afford if everything went well. But many signs point to that everything might not go swimmingly, from global events (US/China tariffs, climate change) to local things - an Australian recession triggered by one of the many ongoing factors, like a government unable to implement decent policies, slowing construction, slowing demand for Australian exports, yada yada.

there are real life ppl who have committed to humongous mortgages in Australia in the last 2-3 yrs which are already underwater - this means they can't sell their house if they are struggling with payments, or they bought the wrong thing, or they realised (too late) that they don't like having to pay half their income to the bank, and the associated pressures of needed to stay in that high paying job with no option of ever switching to other things they always wanted to do.

To some extent, this is a firstworldproblem, I mean they have their cake (a nice job) and the icing (a nice house) but its still stressful and lowers quality of life for ppl who are otherwise seemingly doing quite well. I'd argue that debt is a huge mental burden for a significant amount of the people holding overpriced mortgages, and there isn't enough discussion in this country about it.

Besides the personal stuff, there are a lot of big picture society level implications of high housing pricing - see Death and Life of Great American Cities for a nice intro discussion on how housing effects ppl living there.

The other thing which has been ongoing in Australia for many years now is that the very fabric of Australia is changing - I don't know of many older Aussies whose kids stay anywhere close to them - except in a few cases where the bank of mum and dad essentially bought the house or rented one of their IP's for cheap to their kids. This doesn't seem very healthy to me.

Its not good for society to form communities based mostly on income. You end up with communities which are very stratified by income and family wealth, and some books argue quite convincingly that this really makes it hard for real close knit communities to form.

In this sub many ppl blame ppl for overpaying for houses but most ppl just do what society, banks, governments, newspapers, everyone is telling them to do - to take out a max loan, put in a little bit more, then buy a house.

Leaving aside the bottom 25% or so and looking at how the middle class to upper ppl live in well off countries, like Europe and USA, nobody (hyperbole but still) has anywhere close to the debt ratio that so many Australians have. Australia has been a "lucky country" in many respects but that doesn't give Australia a magic exemption from debt.

Yes and no. The idea was that the Metro would serve as both a subway system and as a commuter rail-- thus the bad seating layout and the decision to have carpets. They wanted it to feel more like a commuter line.

If you looked at a map of NYC that included the full length of the NJT and Metro-North lines, it would look far more absurd.

I do think that there's path dependence between the Metro and sprawl, but I think that saying it's a causal relationship like you are is overstating it.

Also, might be of interest to some in this thread: Zachary Schrag's The Great Society Subway.

First of all - if Durham doesn't pay for the Durham County part, the project is dead. The plan says that Garner to RTP is not feasible and the project would have to go from Garner to Durham so that it can connect all the urban centers in the area. You don't think there is enough density in downtown Raleigh, downtown Durham to support the plan? Don't count out rail as well for driving dense developments near stations as well since it'll be a convenience to live near the stations. As for the airport, well they're using existing track and the closest it gets to the airport is Morrisville so there will be shuttles from there to the airport. We're talking about a low budget rail option here and a spur to the airport would be expensive (not to mention the airport has been resistant to expanded public transportation options due to parking revenues)

I think that some off-road aspect of a transit plan is necessary - yes, it is expensive but it is far less expensive than building a light rail option from scratch like Durham/Chapel Hill. If traffic is the driving point to build out our transit system, why force all the options to use the roads that are going to be congested even further in a few years? That just doesn't make sense to me.

The consultant who worked on the plan - Jarrett Walker - is one of the leaders when it comes to developing transit systems and has worked on transit plans around the world in different countries so I trust that they know what they're doing (http://jarrettwalker.com/places/). If you're interested in reading about transit, he wrote a good book about different theories, decisions and strategies that transit planners deal with: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1597269727/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

1: more intended as commentary attacking the underlying comment’s sense of “this is my neighborhood because I’m Dutch and so were the people there hundreds of years ago”. Everyone is welcome, but that attitude is kind of nativist and off putting in addition to entitled.

2: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X - The people in the community make it great again which makes it attractive for gentrification.

Yes!!! I read about this in Jeff Speck's "Walkable City," and it instantly turned me into the kind of person who spouts off lectures about the importance of trees in cities whenever it comes up in conversation. I'd always been in favor of them, because they're beautiful and they provide shade and create and environment that's generally pleasant to be in, but there are SO MANY more tangible, measurable benefits. It's beyond frustrating to me that it's not prioritized more.

EDIT: For those interested, Jeff Speck's TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_the_walkable_city

Here's some books from my library:

The Affordable Housing Reader - Basics on how affordable housing in the US works (or how it doesn't work...)

Cities for People/Walkable City/Death and Life of Great American Cities - Classics that really pertain to most things

The Public Wealth of Cities - How to leverage public/city assets to benefit the most amount of people

The Color of Law - How racism has shaped our cities

Happy City - Planning for social health

> especially leftist urbanism (anti suburbs and single family housing, pro mass-transit etc)

I'd be weary of calling this 'leftist urbanism,' since all of these are perfectly compatible with right-wing viewpoints, just handled very differently. You're looking more for sustainable urbanism and the social impacts of it. The books I have recommended above do all have a centrist or left lean to it though.

That is an awesome idea! I would love to see a documentary like that!

In the meantime, you might want to pick up this book.

BENDER 63.4% 1st CHOICE

It was kind of worrying to see all of the Saralyn Romanishan signs in front of mansions in the Wedge. I'm glad the bulk of the ward stayed sane, and I hope Bender now realizes that the NIMBY vote is a lost cause, even if you court them by downzoning the neighborhood interior.

Congrats to /u/CMAndrewJohnson for winning 87% of the first choice votes in his ward.

Edit: Looks like the socialist might win in ward 3. Someone please send her a copy of Walkable City by Jeff Speck (or at least his TED talk).

Not OP but you should totally read Robert Caro's The Power Broker. It's a ~1,500 page tome but it's a fantastic breakdown of the history of Moses specifically, and Jacobs as well.

Then follow it up with Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities for the counter argument. After that you can decide if you want to get into City Planning as a career. Lots of politics unfortunately...

Portland (and Oregon as a whole) has a long history of nativism and resentment of outsiders.

Really

Long

Honestly, I'm glad I left after college. I've seen more of the country, I know about what other towns are going through. Most cities would KILL to be in the position Portland is in. Portlanders: you should be welcoming all these smart, ambitious people with open arms. You should applaud when 1 of the 500,000 bungalows in SE gets torn down to make room for more dense housing. You should tell NIMBYs who try to shut down apartment construction in transit corridors to shove it.

It really saddens me to see so many people from my homeland throw away the enormous potential their city has because they want a relatively larger slice of the pie. Please, everyone, get over your aversion to immigrants and high density housing. Portland has a once-in-a-century opportunity to transform itself in to a Great American City. And we have the resources to do it. Now we just need the grit.

If you haven't read it already, Jarrett Walker's book Human Transit is a must to understand the how and why of transit.
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Transit-Clearer-Thinking-Communities/dp/1597269727/

It sounds like you're wanting a network which is ridership-driven rather than coverage-driven (this is explained in the book, but it's what it sounds like. Many small city networks aim to serve people who cannot drive with winding, inefficient routes which serve a large area. Other cities try to carry the most people with efficient routes and either miss some people who need transit or serve them with paratransit instead).

From a quick perusal of the WRTA website, it looks like most routes are reasonably direct and run every 30-60 minutes. This sounds to me like a network that is trying to be ridership-driven, albeit with limited resources. More frequency on busy routes would spur a lot of ridership by making the bus a viable option for casual trip that require no planning ahead -- just show up and wait for the next bus which runs every 10-15 minutes.

I didn't see a ridership report by line; that would be needed for any scheming of how to redesign the network or add frequency.

I've read this book - it's really fascinating and I'd highly recommend it.

Similarly, if you are interested in the public transport side of this I'd recommend reading "Human Transit" by Jarrett Walker which touches on how design and attitude influences efficiency in a transit system.

Jarret Walker is awesome, he has an excellent semi-lay introduction to transit theory called Human Transit that I highly recommend.

Yeah, I'm not sure that Cleveland is ready yet unfortunately. Even in Ohio City - right on the Rapid, across the bridge from downtown, etc - people still want cars. Like others have said, public transport to the suburbs is abysmal so you can't even get to inner ring places like Brooklyn or Linndale without a hassle. I hope one day it'll get better though. It's slowly getting better in Pittsburgh but I still get people who ask how my husband and I can get around with only one car.

PS if you haven't read Jeff Speck yet, you'll like him ;)

I was looking forward to A Burgler's Guide to the City once I heard about it - https://www.amazon.com/Burglars-Guide-City-Geoff-Manaugh/dp/0374117268 - but it's out now and I already read it and really enjoyed it! So I guess the next thing I'm looking forward to is the Star Trek movie, but it's more of a cautious optimism than anything I would describe as "extremely warranted".

Seeing that you're interested in urban geography, Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities is a must. It's not always strictly about geography, but it's probably one of the best books written about cities in the 20th century, and it can be relevant in almost any urban geography course.

If you like that sub there's a good book called A Burglar's Guide to the City

It opened my eyes to bunch of stuff I never even thought of. Thus allowing me to protect myself better.

It's a picture book, but I really like "The Works" by Kate Ascher. It's not something you would study from, but it's beautifully made.

This would be an instant purchase for me if it was heavily based on the concepts of New Urbanism. That's really what I've been looking for in a city building sim, a game which understands and rewards the design principles most modern urban planners actually use in the real world.

I'd love a game which really allows you to get down to the street level and design cities based on pedestrian usage. I want to be able to tinker with things like sidewalk width, street trees, building height restrictions... all the little details, and see the effects of changing them. On a larger level, I'd like to be rewarded economically and environmentally for creating lovely urban neighborhoods that people would enjoy living in, on a street-by-street basis. And I'd like a game which models the long-term consequences of automobile culture as well--allow you to design those kinds of cities (Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix) but show the consequences of suburban sprawl in unhappiness, pollution, and economic problems.

Most city building sims play at too large of a scale for my taste, and often ignore what modern urban designers understand about what's important in real cities. Sim City especially has often been very guilty of this--encouraging heavily separated uses, with big zones of commercial, industrial, residential rather than the all-important "mixed-use neighborhood" where everything your citizens need is in walking distance of where they live.

A couple of books I'd recommend you read if you're interested in learning more about urban design as you develop this game:

• Walkable City by Jeff Speck
  
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
  
  and Jeff Speck's TED talk for a very brief overview.

The book they reference there is pretty fantastic. Incredibly thorough and comprehensive history of WMATA and Metro, right from the start.

This is actually a really good book. It has a lot of really great articles with explanations about what they mean. Its a textbook but its a really good one for urban political economy.

> Or should I say Censii?

Lol.

> 2001 and 2011 UK Censuses.

Those Censuses don't appear to break out country of origin, they're just divided up by ethnic group.

> but both are actually happening

While I'm not convinced of this, it's largely beside the point. Families move to the suburbs out of convenience, not necessarily a preference. This thread is about building dense urban communities that outshine the suburbs by being walkable and sustainable.

You should consider reading Where We Want to Live or Death and Live of Great American Cities

The Architecture of Community by Leon Krier
Wonderful, wonderful book that is totally accessible to the layperson while also engaging in some really meaningful and thought provoking discourse.
It's a little more expensive than you requested ($33), but totally worth it.

Not sure if you're into this, but I loved The Works - each chapter tells you how things like water and electricity end up in your house, how traffic works, how the roads are built, et cetera. It's got lots of diagrams and is fun.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Works-Anatomy-Kate-Ascher/dp/0143112708

Some recent-ish architecture/urban design books that are really good reads & from well respected practitioners!

Walkable City by Jeff Speck

Happy City by Charles Montgomery

Cities for People by Jan Gehl

Otherwise, most stationary/art stores should stock some [Rotring] (http://www.rotring.com/en/) pens/mechanical pencils. They are high quality drafting pens that are always in high demand.

source: I own a lot, and still want many more. Always handy.

Walkable City by Jeff Speck is a good book about this.

I'm not proposing we intentionally increase congestion or remove cars or something like that. But a phenomenon called "induced demand" basically states that increasing road capacity does not solve congestion. When a road is expanded, it makes journey times temporarily shorter, leading people to drive more until this improvement in journey times disappears. End result: traffic crawls at same pace, but now you've added more cars to the road.

Accommodations for car traffic actually harm business. The most successful businesses are walkable ones: see Robson, Granville, commercial, 4th ave. Building wider roads and parking makes the street less pleasant to walk on. People no longer walk along a street hopping from store to store. Businesses suffer.

It is much more cost efficient, environmentally friendly, business friendly and city friendly to invest in other forms of infrastructure: transit, cycling, walking. The NPA's transport policies will hurt communities, hurt businesses and cost us a lot of money.

No problem at all. If you want a much better breakdown of it I HIGHLY suggest: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/0679644334/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501702472&sr=8-1&keywords=jane+jacobs+the+death+and+life+of+great+american+cities

A remarkable read that will never ever be outdated... it's pretty much the bible for us City Planners/Transportation Planners

The other recommendations are solid, and this may be a bit lighter than you want, but The Works by Kate Ascher is a great illustrated book on how the city's infrastructure is put together.

If you wanna know why it happened the way it happened, I highly recommend reading The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro.

Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History, and Meaning

A Global History of Architecture

A Visual Dictionary of Architecture

The Death and Life of Great American Cities


Bonus book because I like this firm's concepts:

Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution - Bjarke Ingels Group

Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston would be a nice coffee table selection that also happens to give an exhaustive history of how our city's crazy geography developed. A good choice for anyone new to the city who's interested in the history as well as learning to orient themselves.

I love reading and hearing about model cities. Here's some other media if you like this sort of stuff.

[Book]

One of the most engrossing biographies I've ever read, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is the story of a power hungry paperclip maximizer but instead of prioritizing paperclips over everything, Moses prioritizes wildly expensive highways. His fall, around the late 60s, lead to renewed interest in public transit and a counter-revolution articulated in Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Seeing Like a State A condemnation on the central planners infatuation with the top-down and observable over the bottom-up and functional.

[Article]

Reports of the death of China's vacant cities may be [greatly exaggerated.](
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-16/china-s-manhattan-sheds-ghost-town-image-as-towers-begin-to-fill)

Seeing Like A State: Book Review A fun review of the book mentioned above.

[Podcast]

Every city planner has a plan until they get doused with a squatter's bucket of piss.

For those further interested in charter cities, see recently-ousted world bank chief economist Paul Romer's conversation on charter cities.

On Usonia, Flank Lloyd Wright's stab at an affordable model US town.

Worth noting that there are lots of examples of urban planning strategies where density was increased without increasing traffic - including one from the Denver Metro area! Belmar tripled its density without worsening traffic or widening roads. There's a whole chapter about it in this book, but unless you're a very boring person like me, I probably wouldn't recommend reading it :)

I just read. A Burglar's Guide To The City

Pretty neat.

Sprawl Repair Manual by Galina Tachieva should be added to the top list. It gives some great examples of how to use planning to update poorly planned areas.

I bought this book awhile back because I was in awe of the logistics of huge cities. It's a fascinating read.

If you're interested, there's a great history of the metro that goes into detail about how much those design decisions were originally fought over.

Great Society Subway

Recommended reading for individuals who don't actually know anything about parking policy: The High Cost of Free Parking
, Walkable City

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" http://www.amazon.com/Death-American-Cities-Modern-Library/dp/0679600477/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293317786&sr=8-1

Looks pretty compelling.

http://www.amazon.com/Gaining-Ground-History-Landmaking-Boston/dp/0262194945

this is a pretty good book. I am sure your local library has a copy

Shoup's great. Also check out Walkable City by Jeff Speck

Yeah. If you did the setting right it could make a really good lesson for kids about the dangers of privatizing everything and how it's insanely anti democracy.

Real cities work through stochasticity and barely controlled chaos. One need only look at the neighborhoods that were cut in half by the interstate highway projects of the '40s and '50s. "The village" in NYC is a great example of a neighborhood that resisted a highway and remained a thriving area to this day.

You might be interested in the work of Jane Jacobs. She would be the ultimate antithesis of the ideas in the link you posted. It would be a good source of ideas on how the players might feel about living in a privatized city.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

I highly recommended a read on this book by Ryan Gravel the visionary of the beltline. https://www.amazon.com/Where-Want-Live-Reclaiming-Infrastructure/dp/1250078253

Fixing existing developments and creating better ones in the future are very different beasts. One very influential group working on latter is the Congress for New Urbanism. A useful volume by a few of CNU's leading practioners is Suburban Nation. One pertinent critique of New Urbanism though is that is has been relatively ineffective about the retrofitting you describe. For that you might check out books like Retrofitting Suburbia.

If you want a good rant on how we got into the mess J.H. Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere is an angry read. On patterns that underlay places we like being in, there is the always present work of Christopher Alexander. For my money one of the most under-read great urbanists of our time is Richard Sennett, particularly his book The Uses of Disorder.

Finally, Jacob's has a lot of prescriptive stuff in Death and Life. I'll give you that it is not as rule-based as most contemporary approaches, but therein lies its greatness.

Three big ones for me:

the city reader : A good 'all around' book summarising various schools of thought.

Jane Jacobs - death and life of great american cities : Classic and influential

Bernard Rudofsky - behind the picture window. : Rudofsky is incisive in his commentary on cultural norms and the simple joys of everyday living.


[edit] and another as an Australian: Robin Boyd - The Australian Ugliness : Simple primer mainly on the growth of suburbia and the ugly houses within.

The City Reader is like a Cliff Notes of every important book about planning and urban theory. http://www.amazon.com/City-Reader-Routledge-Urban/dp/0415556651

I also learned a lot from City of Quartz: Fortress LA by Mike Davis.

All hail Jane Jacobs.

Very cool. I've been meaning to make cities using the layouts shown in the Sprawl Repair Manual (http://www.sprawlrepair.com/ and http://www.amazon.com/Sprawl-Repair-Manual-Galina-Tachieva/dp/1597267325) -- you should check it out when you get a chance.

I've always wanted this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Gaining-Ground-History-Landmaking-Boston/dp/0262194945

Even the few pages you can preview are fascinating.

Many cities in this area do have the core of walkable infrastructure in them and just require a bit of change to make them better. There is an entire sub-genre of urban development books related to the very concept of turning sprawl into dense walkable neighborhoods (e.g. Sprawl Repair Manual, Retrofitting Suburbia, Walkable City).

Puget Sound Regional Council takes these kinds of issues into consideration with regional planning. City planners also take these kinds of things into consideration. There is very high interest in building more urban walkable neighborhoods even in suburbs. The problem is it takes time and money for cities to implement these rules, and construction projects to correct deficiencies, and the building stock to turn over.

For those who haven't read it, I highly suggest reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, even if you have only a slight interest in architecture and urban planning. It was one of the first works to argue against the (then popular) planning practices like Le Corbusier's, and Robert Moses' (who wreaked havoc on neighborhoods and championed automobile connectivity, rather than human connectivity).

Despite it being written in the 1960s, it's aged little. It's an absolutely enthralling work, and is now the standard for many urban planning decisions, thankfully.

>Do you think it would work?

Well, yes, but it would also work if they were just walking and not praying. See, e.g. Jacobs.

>Separation of church and state

I've only read the headline: seems fine? I'm assuming that these volunteer-led patrols could also include Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Satanists, Wiccans, Atheists, etc. He does seem to be saying "just walk and talk".

Jan Gehl has tons of research on this topic. This book of his is worth checking out for sure.

Were you inspired by Trains, Buses, People? He has a very similar map for every city in the US served by rail with the addition of highlighting job centers.

Read Ryan Gravel's (the Beltline guy) book at the beach over the weekend: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Want-Live-Reclaiming-Infrastructure/dp/1250078253.

Very Atlanta/Beltline specific. Highly recommend if you want to learn about the historical context of the birth of Beltline and the long-term goals of the project

>The pneumatic tube mail was a postal system operating in New York City from 1897 to 1953 using pneumatic tubes. Following the creation of the first pneumatic mail system in Philadelphia in 1893, New York City's system was begun, initially only between the old General Post Office on Park Row and the Produce Exchange on Bowling Green, a distance of 3,750 feet.
>Eventually the network stretched up both sides of Manhattan Island all the way to Manhattanvilleon the West side and "Triborough" in East Harlem, forming a loop running a few feet below street level. Travel time from the General Post Office to Harlem was 20 minutes. A crosstown line connected the two parallel lines between the new General Post office on the West Side and Grand Central Terminal on the east, and took four minutes for mail to traverse. Utilizing the Brooklyn Bridge a spur line also ran from Church Street in lower Manhattan to the general post office in Brooklyn (now Cadman Plaza) taking four minutes. Operators of the system were referred to as "Rocketeers". Wikipedia

More reading on the Network

From The Works: Anotamy of a City by Kate Ascher

A former city planner who works as a consultant wrote a book called Walkable Cities who talks about that very issue. Hard to say how EPCOT would have worked out but he did take that issue into consideration. The plan was to have multiple underground levels to separate different types of traffic and to allow pedestrians to move about without that worry, much the way it is in the theme parks.

Jeff Speck has some good introductory writing on the topic. Check out Step 5 of Part II under the heading "Keep it complicated"

That PDF is kinda janky, so here's an Amazon link if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=walkable+city&qid=1563914434&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Excerpt:
> Welcome to the world of risk homeostasis, a very real place that exists well
outside the blinkered gaze of the traffic engineering profession. Risk homeostasis
describes how people automatically adjust their behavior to maintain a comfortable
level of risk. It explains why poisoning deaths went up after childproof caps were
introduced—people stopped hiding their medicines—and why the deadliest
intersections in America are typically the ones you can navigate with one finger on the
steering wheel and a cellphone at your ear. [9]

You're very welcome!

Normally, I would list these books in addition to a small description and reasons why I found them particularly interesting or engaging. However, it’s getting a bit late, so I’m just going to give you a list of some books that I particularly recommend. I should have some time later this afternoon to talk about them more in depth, and to answer any questions that you might have.

• Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure by David Freeland
  
• The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor by Marguerite Holloway
  
• Conquering Gotham: Building Penn Station and Its Tunnels by Jill Jonnes
  
• City on a Grid: How New York Became New York by Gerard Koeppel
  
• New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore
  
• The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough
  
• Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City by Catherine McNeur
  
• Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York by Evan T. Pritchard
  
• Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and The Forgotten Colony that Shaped America by Russell Shorto
  
• Hell's Kitchen and the Battle for Urban Space: Class Struggle and Progressive Reform in New York City, 1894-1914 by Joseph Varga
  

A Burglar's Guide to the City and American Heiress- two recent nonfiction books that each kept me captivated for the duration of a transatlantic flight

If you have the technical skills, make maps. I'm a programmer, so I made a transit app for my local system. Get in touch with other transit advocates in your area. Perhaps you can agree on some low hanging fixes and lobby for them. Deepen your understanding of the problem, I suggest Human Transit and The High Cost of Free Parking

I live in Philadelphia, and people seem to think that the homeless people are the people begging for money in front of 7/11s and on the corner. For the most part, these people choose to be actively homeless. They don't try to improve their lives. They either have addiction issues or mental issues (I see many homeless people here who clearly have mental disorders who need some kind of help).

I don't think I see actual homeless people described in the paper. Also, I don't see the need for Housing First objectives. I think getting rid of zoning laws and perhaps increasing Section 8 vouchers would do the trick. I am also skeptical of public housing initiatives, and all of my issues with them can actually be found in a non-economic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

1. The Life and Death of American Cities - Jane Jacobs is a must. It basically created the entire category of urban design. Absolutely canonical.
   
   Also Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson.
   
   TEDTalk associated with this book is a good listen.
   
   I'm more informed about "New Urbanism" which was taught at my school. Look at Congress of New Urbanism.

• "Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics" http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Survival-Dialogue-Foundations-Commerce/dp/0679748164 and
  
  
• "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X
  
  both by Jane Jacobs. Anything by Jane Jacobs, really.

There're the epics Gotham and Greater Gotham books on NYC. Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I've read it a half dozen times.

I think you would really like this book. The author explains how the design of cities around cars takes priority and causes numerous problems. This forces us to sacrifice our needs for cities that accommodate cars and not our social needs. There is also an increase in traffic deaths and accidents because we have bigger streets and faster traffic which causes people to go into autopilot mode and not focus on surroundings.

https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728

https://www.amazon.com/Works-Anatomy-City-Kate-Ascher/dp/0143112708

Sprawl Repair Manual

Haha, Chicago and DC are literally the two exceptions. The book Walkable City gets into the history. I'm jealous of you guys!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Society-Subway-Washington/dp/080188246X is the book most often mentioned.

Edit: fixed link

The Works; Anatomy of a City

You are hardly the first person to come up with this idea. Start reading here.

http://www.amazon.com/Works-Anatomy-City-Kate-Ascher/dp/0143112708

Jan Gehl - Cities for People

> have yet to understand how everything here works.

try this book which explains how NYC's various infrastructure systems work.

Arts & Photography: https://www.amazon.com/Imaginary-Cities-Darran-Anderson/dp/0992765595/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500713407&sr=1-2&keywords=imaginary+cities; https://www.amazon.com/Burglars-Guide-City-Geoff-Manaugh/dp/0374117268/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500713469&sr=1-7&keywords=imaginary+cities (both from the subcategory Architecture)

History: https://www.amazon.com/Devil-White-City-Madness-Changed/dp/0375725601/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500713574&sr=1-17; https://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Deadly-Obsession-Amazon/dp/1400078458/ref=sr_1_69?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500713679&sr=1-69

While the topic is laundromats... its much bigger issue. Cities need diversity, and diversity in services...
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

So go the laundromats, bars, hardware stores, any specialty shops, florists, shoe repair, pet stores, thrift stores... it goes on. All these are being sacrificed for high density housing.

But actually just this

Here is the book you are looking for: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

Don't know of any films, but this is a fantastic book: Gaining Ground

Everyone who lives in Boston should spend an hour with this book at least once: http://www.amazon.com/Gaining-Ground-History-Landmaking-Boston/dp/0262194945

Here is the mobile version of your link

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X Highways allowed companies to expand and not have to deal with cities and thier demands. US land use is more to blame as we cannot force people to live near a train station with zoning controls like they can in other countries. Jane Jacobs says this many times that highways allowed people to live far outside the cores of cities declined because of this. She argues that we should be forced to live on top of each other.

Check out The Works by Kate Asher. It's a ridiculously well illustrated guide to all the different systems (water, power, streets, transit, phone, etc. etc.) that keep New York City running
http://www.amazon.com/The-Works-Anatomy-Kate-Ascher/dp/0143112708

If you haven't already, I recommend reading Jarret Walker's blog and book
http://www.humantransit.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Transit-Clearer-Thinking-Communities/dp/1597269727/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317087860&sr=1-1

Also, a search of http://seattletransitblog.com/ will turn up a lot of discussion on streetcars versus buses versus lightrail versus commuter trains versus traditional subways.

Besides the huge cost of building these bridges at every intersection, or at least the major intersections, is the problem of pulling people away from the sidewalk and the businesses that reside there. By designing a city so exclusively for cars, you run the risk of disenfranchising pedestrians, which is a dangerous game to play.

Pedestrians are vital to the local economy, especially in cities, because they are far more likely to give their patronage to businesses than the people driving.
There are a bunch of other problems with discouraging pedestrians, like the destruction of the sense of community of an area or the public health problems that could be engendered to name a few.

I'm pulling these points from a book called "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time" by Jeff Speck. It's a really interesting read, and if you're interested in the subject of urban planning, it's a must read.

Here's a link to the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save-America/dp/0865477728

No, they all have much smaller block sizes and narrower streets. Even though NYC's are fairly long in one dimension, there's s fair number of avenues in NYC that cut their blocks in half, much like the mid block streets I mentioned in SLC.

There's a few interesting books that talk about how the layout of streets affect the development of a city. Green Metropolis specifically talks about NYC and The Death and Life of Great American Cities talks generally about city planning.

Tanskalainen arkkitehti Jan Gehl on kirjoittanut kirjoja "ihmismittakaavasta" jonka mukaan kaupungit jotka suunnitellaan ihmisen perspektiivin mukaan ovat helpommin lähestyttäviä eikä ihminen tunne itseään liian pieneksi rakennusten juurella.

http://architectureau.com/articles/cities-for-people/

https://www.amazon.com/Cities-People-Jan-Gehl/dp/159726573X

Tässä kanssa hyvää yhteenvetoa Gehlin toisesta kirjasta:

http://bloomingrock.com/2014/06/19/how-the-built-environment-can-help-build-or-destroy-social-capital/

"One of the problems with high-rises is that people on the upper floors won’t spontaneously go outside as much, just because going outside is not as easy as stepping out the front door. "

On muuten totta tuo, huomasin tuon asuessani San Franciscossa 28. kerroksessa, matka kadulle olohuoneen sohvalta kestää yllättävän pitkään jolloin on mukavampi vaikka tilata kotiin ruokaa kuin lähteä ulos. Omasta laiskuudesta varmasti kyse mutta huomaan Helsingissä kahlaavani katuja paljon enemmän kuin SF:ssä.

Koitin google scholarista hakea jotain tiedettä taustalle mutta huomasin että alkoi työpäivä humahtaa taas uuden kiinnostuksenaiheen tutkimiseen :D

> People can drive, from suburban to transit zones.

Oh god no, this is the big mistake right here. Please go read Walkable City by Jeff Speck, he specifically shows how this has failed time and again and is a bad idea. Building park and rides to get into town...oh god no, that's what Texas and DC do, it's a gigantic mistake and a huge waste of money and energy.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008423170/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Actually there is something to this. Read Jane Jacobs' Death of Great American Cities or simple visit cities in any other part of the world.

Her theses is because we try to eliminate foot traffic and loitering and "street life" in our cities, we've effectively remove the one thing that prevents crime: having lots of neighbors on the street "just living" who act as a deterrent. It's empty streets that make crime easy because there's no one to witness or challenge the crime.

This is also related to the tendencies toward Car Culture, suburbs and Brutalist architecture in the US which look good on paper in the abstract but simply "doesn't work" for people in the city. All of these things do exactly the same thing to eliminate pedestrian traffic that eliminates the prevention of crime.

So in this sense, everyone becomes a cop without even knowing it just by being part of a community and neighborhood.

This is why it's important for American cites to move away from this traditional designs of emphasizing cars, brutalist architecture, un-walkable streets, separated zoning (vs. mixed use), lack of mass transit, etc.

The majority of all development in DTLA is completely shortsighted and go against proper urban planning in principle. I share your frustration and I'm glad there's some of us who think what they're doing is wrong for the city and its people. The city has or now seems it had a great opportunity in making this a great city. But that seems to fade further and further. I've become more pessimistic as the years pass. Jose Huizar has become the Robert Moses of Los Angeles going on a binge rubber-stamping horrible unwelcoming structures. History tells us these developments will not have longevity thus destroying the city's appeal. And for the guy who said we need a parking lot in that development. Time will prove you wrong. Studies conclude parking is extremely detrimental to a city both in economics and property value. The people in charge of city planning should travel a bit and take note of what works and what doesn't. You would think these people are well versed and educated but that seems to prove otherwise. Maybe Jose Huizar should read a little about Jane Jacobs' legacy in standing up to bad urban planning. http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

No, I'm not talking about the Unité.

I'm talking about huge housing projects built primarily in the 1950s and 60s in every American city, housing created specifically for those of low-income, modeled after Corbu's Ville Radieuse, Ville Contemporaine and Plan Voisin, plans which Corbu touted worldwide as the solution for urban slums. Of course Corbu was dealing with a specific set of issues in post-colonial France, but he was also creating a framework of over-generalizations, based on utter fantasy, that he exported globally. It didn't become known as the "The International Style" by accident. He and his generation aggressively pushed bad urban design policy on an unwitting public.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Wrestling with Moses are good books dealing with mid-century urbanism in America. Death and Life… is Jane Jacobs' treatise on the failures of Corbusian urbanism. Wrestling… is an account of her very public battle with Robert Moses, whom she managed to stop from ramming several Los Angeles-style highways across Manhattan, leveling Soho and installing huge areas of Corbusian wasteland, simply by using the West Village as a model for a high-functioning urban neighborhood.

Relevant passage from Walkable City by Jeff Speck

>#AMERICAN CAR-NAGE

>Even if we were to dispute the notion that walking is good for you, it is indisputable that cars kill a lot of people. Car crashes have killed over 3.2 million Americans, considerably more than all of our wars combined.^24 They are the leading cause of death for all Americans between the ages of one and thirty-four,^25 and their monetary cost to the nation is estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

>Most people take the risks of driving for granted, as if they were some inevitable natural phenomenon. We don't bother with hand-wringing over the half-a-percent chance that our lives will end in a car crash^26 or the roughly one-in-three chance that we will eventually be seriously injured in one, since these risks seem unavoidable. But the numbers from other developed nations tell a different story. While the United States in 2004 suffered 14.5 traffic fatalities per 100,000 population, Germany, with its no-speed-limit autobahns, suffered only 7.1. Denmark rated a 6.8, Japan a 5.8, and the U.K. hit 5.3.^27 And who beat them all? New York City, with a rate of 3.1. Indeed, since September 11, 2001, New York has saved more lives in traffic than it lost on 9/11.

>If our entire country shared New York City's traffic statistics, we would prevent more than twenty-four thousand deaths a year. San Francisco and Portland both compete with New York, with rates of 2.5 and 3.2 deaths per 100,000 population, respectively. Meanwhile, Atlanta comes in at 12.7, and anti-urban Tampa at a whopping 16.2.^28 Clearly, it's not just how much you drive, but where you drive and, more accurately, how those places were designed. Older, denser cities have much lower automobile fatality rates than newer, sprawling ones. It is the places shaped around automobiles that seem most effective at smashing them into each other.

>I provide all this information to communicate the point that, while we Americans may take our great risk of automobile injury for granted, it is actually something that is well within our control—in the long term, as a function of how we design places, and in the short term, as a function of where we choose to live. This discussion becomes particularly ironic when we consider how many people through the decades have decamped from the city into the suburbs ostensibly for the safety of their families. Dr. Jackson is famously fond of asking his audiences "In what kind of community are you most likely to end up dead in a pool of blood?"^29 He points to the work of Alan Durning, who analyzed the combined risk of dying from two causes—traffic crashes and crime—in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, British Columbia. He found that, on average, if you add the two factors together, you are 19 percent safer in the inner city than in the outer suburbs.

>More recently, several more thorough studies have been completed by William Lucy at the University of Virginia, looking at auto accidents and murder by strangers. In one, he found that the ten safest places in the state of Virginia were eight of its most densely populated cities and the two counties abutting Washington, D.C., while the ten most dangerous places were all low-population counties.^30 In another, he compared crash and crime statistics in eight large American cities between 1997 and 2000. Here the data produced more subtle results. The basic theory held true: car crashes far outweighed murder by strangers as a cause of death in all locations and, in older cities like Pittsburgh, the inner cities were considerably safer overall. But in more modern places like Dallas and Houston, where the downtowns are largely unwalkable, the city car-crash statistics were almost as bad as in the suburbs. Even with its fourteen annual traffic deaths per 100,000 population, however, Dallas was still safer overall than half of its surrounding counties.