Reddit reviews The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 50th Anniversary Edition (Modern Library)

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.

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A remarkable read that will never ever be outdated...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

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

Probably the most influential urban planning book ever was written as a response to trends in 1960s development: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Along the same lines, the Pulitizer Prize winning The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the definitive biography of Jacobs-nemesis Robert Moses who was super important in the planning decisions made in New York City in the 50s and 60s.

Witold Rybczynski's Makeshift Metropolis includes a pretty good summary of urban planning throughout the 20th century in America, which is helpful for putting trends from the 1960s into context.

I don't have a specific book to recommend here, but also look into the design of Brasilia, since it was by far the biggest and most complete project designed on the sort of modernist principles that dominated the 50s and 60s urban planning scene. It's obviously not an American city, but many of the planners and architects who worked on it worked on American projects as well, and the ideas that influenced it were very important in American thinking on urban design also.

These are all sort of general interest recommendations, though. Sorry if you were looking for something more technical.

But actually just this

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.