What are the best books about designing cities or about what makes for great cities?

Asked by Patrick OShaughnessy

What are the best books about designing cities? Or about what makes for great cities?

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At the core of <i>A Pattern Language</i> is the philosophy that in designing their environments people always rely on certain ‘languages,’ which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system which gives them coherence.<br
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<b>An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure.</b><br /><br />Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the gro
www.amazon.com
Charles Montgomery’s Happy City will revolutionize the way we think about urban life. After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or
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Recommended by staysaasy Alex White Scott Snelling and 2 others
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in
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One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost
www.goodreads.com
Jordan Rodriguez 3mos

May not be exactly what you had in mind but check out The Power Broker

Pundit Review 3mos

Power Broker hands down

Possible Value Research 3mos

Power Broker because it's about the forces that actually design and shape cities i.e. politics, power, influence and private interests. Reading it and using Charlie Munger's inversion principle might be a good way to design future cities.

Recommended by Lou G Jared Krouss chase adams and 1 other
A pioneering urban economist offers fascinating, even inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future. America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're d
www.amazon.com
Jared Krouss 3mos

I enjoyed Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City

chase adams 3mos

I read this when at Zappos when we were moving to downtown Las Vegas. Good read.

Kahlil Corazo 3mos

I was going to post this

Tokyo is one of the most vibrant and livable cities on the planet, a megacity that somehow remains intimate and adaptive. Compared to Western metropolises like New York or Paris, however, few outsiders understand Tokyo's inner workings. For cities around the globe mired in crisis and seeking new mod
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Recommended by Adam Bahram and Evan Moore
The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an und
www.amazon.com
Adam Bahram 3mos

Not just about cities, but this would be a good lens to add to your research:

Evan Moore 3mos

Scale by Geoffrey West. Cities are complex adaptive systems that can’t be designed top-down.

In <i>The Timeless Way of Building</i> Christopher Alexander presents a new theory of architecture, building, and planning which has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being.<br /><br />He writes, “There is one
www.amazon.com
Recommended by Alex White
The city’s development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. “One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century” (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.<br />
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Recommended by Katherine Collins
A novel, integrative approach to cities as complex adaptive systems, applicable to issues ranging from innovation to economic prosperity to settlement patterns. Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, i
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Recommended by Samarth
Questions of how the design of cities can respond to the challenge of climate change dominate the thoughts of urban planners and designers across the U.S. and Canada. With admirable clarity, Patrick Condon responds to these questions. He addresses transportation, housing equity, job distribution, ec
www.goodreads.com
Samarth 3mos

My urban design prof has written a great book on the subject! Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: Design Strategies for the Post Carbon World

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