14 Best Urban Planning Books

Jane Jacobs challenges prevailing urban planning through observations of streets and neighborhoods. She examines safety, diversity, and the conditions that allow communities to flourish, arguing that large redevelopment schemes often undermine the vitality they are meant to create.

Montgomery investigates how urban design influences happiness, relationships, and everyday behavior. Visiting cities and examining research and experiments, he explores transportation, public space, and neighborhood planning as ways to create more connected and enjoyable urban lives.

Jeff Speck argues that walkability is central to the health and vitality of American downtowns. Drawing on urban planning experience, he examines how design and policy decisions can create streets and communities where walking is practical and appealing.

Jan Gehl argues for urban design shaped by human senses, movement, and everyday social life. Illustrated discussions examine streets and public spaces at walking pace, offering methods for creating lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy cities.

A history of how federal, state, and local governments deliberately created and maintained residential segregation in the United States. It links housing policy to the racial lines that still shape neighborhoods, schools, and wealth.

Christopher Alexander and his colleagues present an approach to designing houses, neighborhoods, and public spaces with the participation of those who use them. The book offers guidance intended to connect people's needs with architecture, planning, and construction.

Robert Moses transforms New York through bridges, parks, highways, and urban redevelopment while accumulating extraordinary political influence. Caro’s biography investigates how an unelected official acquired power, maintained it, and reshaped the lives of the city’s residents.

Lewis Mumford follows the development of cities from early settlements through classical, medieval and modern urban life. He examines how religion, commerce, political power and capitalism shaped their structures, purposes and effects on the people living in them.

Donald Shoup argues that free parking carries hidden economic and environmental costs, encouraging car dependence and urban sprawl. His analysis proposes charging market prices for curb parking, investing revenue in local improvements, and removing requirements for off-street parking in new development.

Kevin Lynch examines how residents perceive and remember the form of their cities. Drawing on studies of Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City, he develops the concept of imageability as a way to evaluate urban environments and inform planning.

Jeff Speck presents 101 practical rules for making towns and cities more walkable. Grouped by subject and illustrated with examples, they address parking, car dependence, comfortable public spaces and the steps citizens and planners can take to advance change.

Allan B. Jacobs investigates the physical qualities that make streets successful through comparisons of urban spaces around the world. Drawings, measurements, maps, and observations of street use support an analysis of design choices and their relationship with urban life.

William H. Whyte investigates how people use small urban public spaces through observation of plazas, parks, and pedestrian behavior. His Street Life Project connects everyday patterns of sitting and gathering with the design decisions that make places more inviting.

Kate Ascher explains the infrastructure that keeps a city functioning, using New York as her main example. Text and graphics reveal how transportation, electricity, water, sewage, garbage, and other systems operate behind everyday urban life.