AKA, what I’ve been reading and some of my favorites, all centered on the urban planning/municipal affairs space. In each area I’ve broken the list down into “light reads,” something pretty fast and easy that you can breeze through if you just want to touch the topic, “b-sides,” which are a bit more technical and in-depth, and “deep cuts”, where only the truly dedicated and nerdy shall tread. Please note that I do not endorse some (or even most) of the policy recommendations in these books. But I still recommend them as familiarity with arguments that don’t immediately appeal to you is still really valuable. Who knows when you’ll have to refute them.

So here we go! I’ve read most of these, but the ones that are in my queue and haven’t read yet have asterisks:

General City Planning

• The Light Read: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives through Urban Design, by Charles Montgomery
• The B-Side: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
• The Deep Cut: Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, by Alain Bertaud

Zoning

• The Light Read: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein
• The B-Side: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, by M. Nolan Gray
• The Deep Cuts: Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation, by William A. Fischel, and America’s Frozen Neighborhoods: The Abuse of Zoning, by Robert C. Ellickson*

Streets and Roads

• The Light Reads: Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, by Charles Marohn, and Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, by Jeff Speck
• The B-Sides: Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places, by Jeff Speck, and Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, by Janette Sadik-Kahn*
• The Deep Cut: The Urban Street Design Guide, by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)

Public Transportation (There aren’t that many books out there about buses. That probably explains a lot about why America is so bad at public transit)

• The Light Read: Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run and Win the Fight for Effective Transit, by Steve Higashide
• The Deep Cut: Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives, by Jared Walker*

Parking (Yes, there are entire books devoted to parking)

• The Light Read: The Quirky World of Parking: Four Decades of Observations, One Parking Space at a Time, by Larry J. Cohen, CAPP*
• The B-Side: Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, by Henry Grabar
• The Deep Cut: The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup

Urban Case Studies and Histories

• The Light Read: Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, by Josh O’Kane
• The B-Sides: For Californians: The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, by Mark Arax, and Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. For everybody else (and Californians): The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson, and The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, by Edward Glaser
• The Deep Cut: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro

City Finances

• The Light Read: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, by Charles Marohn
• The B-Side: In A Bad State: Responding to State and Local Budget Crises, by David Schleicher
• The Deep Cut: Guide to Local Government Finance in California, by Michael Multari, Michael Coleman, Kenneth Hampian, and Bill Statle*

Housing

• The Light Reads: Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, by Conor Dougherty, and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
• The B-Sides: Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, by Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges*, The Voucher Promise: Section 8 and the Fate of an American Neighborhood, by Eva Rosen, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing within Reach (and Keeping It There), by Shane Phillips*, and The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It, by Howard A. Husock
• The Deep Cuts: Making It Work: Legal Foundations for Administrative Reform of California’s Housing Framework, by Chris Elmendorf, Eric Biber, Paavo Monkkonen and Moira O’Neill, and Making It Pencil: The Math Behind Housing Development, by David Garcia, Ian Carlton, Lacy Patterson and Jacob Strawn (the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley)

BONUS: Why Care About Any of This?

Some of you might not be interested in any of the topics above. And that’s ok! Most people aren’t. But let me put on the table the possibility that you just haven’t found the right motivator yet. So let me get personal and share some books that motivate me. I seek the welfare of my city because…

• Mistakes are made quickly but the consequences can extend for decades: It’s hard to believe in our prosperous, peaceful society but cities really can fail if big problems are left unchecked or if assumptions are clung to without any examination. While some people might be thinking Detroit, that city has made something of a comeback in recent years. Other, smaller towns in the United States have simply ceased to exist with little fanfare. Want some ancient, sobering examples? Try Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, by Annalee Newitz. Yes, cities can make mistakes so big (or face catastrophes so profound) that they simply… end. Let’s avoid that.
• Simpler times were better, and we’ve complicated our lives too much: Most people who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s (looking at you, Boomers) vaguely remember a much less hurried existence, before everyone had a personal car, an iPhone in their pocket and the 24/7 news cycle literally wrapped around their wrists in the form of “smart” watches. And that less hurried time was good. How good? Try a little bit of escapism (and magical realism) with Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury, for a sense of what it was like to grown up in “the before times”. The sense of community and connectedness will jump out at you being completely absent from our modern lives. It will make you want to look around at your own town and wonder, why can’t we make space to allow that to happen here? What has gone wrong?
• God matters: Now I’m sure I’ve lost some of you here, but bear with me. If religion isn’t for you, or isn’t for you yet — yes, I’m perfectly happy to be presumptuous — it does matter for a lot of people who live in the city, so it should matter at least a little to those who want to make the city better. Following my faith is at the foundation of why I write this blog (the allusion above to Jeramiah 29:7 wasn’t an accident). Want to understand what Christianity is really all about, in a deeper way than you can get skimming critical tweets? Try The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller. Tim Keller preached most of his life in the heart of New York City, one of the most skeptical (and urban) places on Earth. He has a lot of profound, wonderful and insightful things to say about faith in the rational city. I also happened to have the privilege of learning about Christ under him, as he was the pastor of my neighborhood church for a time. You might learn that finding ways to connect to one another — and fighting against things that keep us apart, be it our busy schedules, our cars, our lack of public spaces, or our neglect of our common institutions — is really the reason why we’re all here.
  
  And, if you’re still a hardcore skeptic or you’re just not into Christianity, try on Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland, instead. Tom Holland is an atheist, so he won’t evangelize to you. But he will teach you a lot about how the vocabulary of Christianity is deeply woven into our cultural vernacular. You won’t look at a speech, a policy or even a Facebook post the same way ever again.
  

Happy reading!