Best urban planning & development books according to redditors

We found 62 Reddit comments discussing the best urban planning & development books. We ranked the 39 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top Reddit comments about Urban Planning and Development:

u/InfamousBrad · 80 pointsr/StLouis

The Bataan Death Mall has always seemed dead to me. I used to go there when it was the only theater I could get to without a bus transfer, but seriously, it's a piece of real estate development that breaks every rule of real estate development. (See Joel Garreau's excellent, and fun to read, book on the subject, Edge City.)

The developers were trying to do something interesting and experimental. Since anchor stores are dying, they tried to replace anchor stores with sports-themed family entertainment attractions, like the Nascar area and the ice skating rink, hoping they'd attract as much foot traffic to the smaller stores as Famous Barr and Sears used to. Not so much. In no small part because, contrary to their early predictions, nobody lives near there or works near there, it's not anybody's "nearby mall."

Also, the need to set aside as much horizontal space as they did for the sports attractions meant breaking the most important rule of real estate development in America: no American will voluntarily walk farther than 660 feet from their car. Mall developers learned ages ago that you can trick them into walking 1,000 feet, but only if it's in a visually stimulating environment (which the Mills isn't) and, more importantly, not in a straight line so they can't see how far they'll have to walk.

The Mills is laid out as two long corridors that only connect at the ends; if you're trying to get from a store on one side to a store on the opposite side, it's every bit of what, half a mile? More? Mall developers learned the hard way, over 50 years ago, that if an American looks at a map of the mall and concludes that they have to walk farther than 660 feet to get to the next store they want to go to, they'll double back to their car and drive around to the nearest entrance. Except that they won't; once they're in their car, half of them decide to just go home instead. (They also won't go down, or up, more than one escalator, which is why every successful mall is three stories tall with the entrance on the 2nd floor.)

tl;dr: If anything was going to save the Mills from its horrible layout, it would have been for the sports- and exercise-themed attractions to become so popular that they attracted huge permanent crowds. That didn't happen.

u/jseliger · 60 pointsr/NeutralPolitics

I answered that question in "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" Matt Yglesias answers it in The Rent Is too Damn High (And What to Do About It).

The short answer is "We need to build more housing."

The problem is that most existing owners don't want more housing because they view their housing as an investment, rather than a piece of decaying capital. William explains this in chapters 7 – 8 of Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation.

u/19djafoij02 · 41 pointsr/worldnews

And Serbia, and the Philippines, and to some extent even Austria. Rural + exurban areas vs. urban + trendy suburban. This book gets into it.

u/doublezanzo · 12 pointsr/bayarea

Agreed. Prop 13 is like a curse to most Californians.

Speaking of taxes, I like Richard Florida’s idea: tax land based on a a formula that benefits dense housing. His book:
New Urban Crisis

u/nmclphoto · 11 pointsr/soccer

Subscribed.

Also this is worth a read

u/yonran · 10 pointsr/sanfrancisco

I am kind of agnostic on land value tax vs. land + building tax at the moment. William Fischel lists several downsides of land value taxes in Zoning Rules!:

  • Property taxes are easier to administer because land + building sales are easier to observe than land only sales.
  • Property taxes are more popular because people do want mansions to be taxed more than small houses on an equivalent lot.
  • With zoning that limits development potential, property values often reflect the value of the land and what you are allowed to do with it anyway. In other words, “What should the land be zoned for?” is the bigger question than “Land tax vs. property tax?”

    Adam Ozimek also listed Some Advantages Of Property Taxes Over Land Value Taxes:

  • Since buildings tend to last a hundred years, old buildings are more like land than capital. The creation of a land value tax instead of property tax on old buildings would just be a tax cut on old buildings. It would not do much to incentivize building.

    So I would be fine with a land value tax, or a split roll that taxed buildings less than land, or a property tax that exempted new buildings for a number of years.

    But the reason that I mentioned all those other alternatives to property and land value taxes is that local voters could actually impose them, whereas Proposition 13 prohibits any state or local government from reassessing property or raising a land tax.
u/davidw · 7 pointsr/Bend

Oh, hey, I know something about that:

u/Kelsig · 7 pointsr/SubredditDrama

That's good, because there is no evidence that displacement is a significant effect. Im glad you now support gentrification :)

https://www.amazon.com/There-Goes-Hood-Gentrification-Ground-ebook/dp/B003NE5GWC


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Vigdor 2002

Freeman-Braconi 2004

McKinnish-Walsh-White 2008

u/xanderg4 · 6 pointsr/politics

This is, actually, not as hard as one would think. You can run for county or city office and there are a number of resources to help you. Check out this book, Sidewalk Strategies. It might even be at your local library. You can also check out EMILYs List which has a great resource on fundraising, I think the book is called Making the Bread Rise? Or something like that.

A lot of people think you need big connections or pie in the sky ideas to win. This is rubbish. Scott Walker got his start running for county office. Thom Tillis, Republican Senator of NC, got his start because he was annoyed about plans to build a bike lane in his city.

Get involved in your local party, recruit younger people to said party, find an issue that matters to your community, run on that issue.

u/elbac14 · 5 pointsr/urbanplanning

Hey, I also love and studied human geography as my undergrad and then went into urban planning for a master's degree. Since you've still got time in high school, I strongly recommend some good books to see if it interests you more (you'll see that actual urban planning isn't like a Sim City game). Don't worry these books are written in easy language so you don't need a university education to appreciate them.

For a general overview of urban planning and why it might interest you, you should check out The Purpose of Planning. It is a British-based book but the concepts are the same (I'm assuming you are American).

For an overview of the current issues/topics within urban planning, I really recommend Walkable City. Another older book by the same author is Suburban Nation if you are curious but Walkable City is a lot more recent.


u/moto123456789 · 5 pointsr/urbanplanning

For transportation, look for the work of:

  • Mike Manville
  • Jonathan Levine (he has a pretty big project coming out in 2019)

    For land use look at works by:

  • Sonia Hirt
  • William Fischel, especially The Economics of Land Use Regulation. This is a great book, although Fischel is a bit too much of a proselytizer of single family home ownership for me.

    I have also just recently come across the blog of Minneapolis planning commissioner Nick Magrino, but his head seems to be in the right place.

    Be wary of any bullshit about the future being in autonomous vehicles.
u/Midnight_in_Seattle · 5 pointsr/nyc

> So what is the solution, then? If you can't improve neighborhoods because of possible gentrification, do you just stop investing in decent working class neighborhoods until they become ghettos?

Increasing the supply of housing throughout the city and moreover removing the parts of the zoning code that strangle housing supply.

Seriously, no one gave a shit or heard of "gentrification" till the '80s when zoning changes made building taller buildings really really fucking hard. That's a subsidy to existing landlords (and generally property owners). NYC is a city of renters and ought to be able to do better through voting.

u/garzo · 3 pointsr/Austin

Even though sometimes the verbiage comes across as a bit "pie in the sky"/"rose tinted", Vishaan Chakrabarti explains in brilliant detail how you can align transit across residential, commercial and mixed use zones and corridors.

If I were in a position to do so, that book would be mandatory reading for everyone involved in any sort of planning of transit in Austin.

u/imdumbandivote · 3 pointsr/Minneapolis

Someone should send Frey and Bender a copy of How To Kill a City
https://www.amazon.com/How-Kill-City-Gentrification-Neighborhood/dp/1568585233

u/doebedoe · 3 pointsr/urbanplanning

All very good suggestions -- though all focused on just one form of urbanism.

If I had to recommend just one book on planning it would be Cities of Tomorrow by Sir Peter Hall. All his books are wonderful, his knighting is no accident. This one is chalked full of original chapters.

Although not a monograph, The City Reader is an exceptional collection of most of the seminal works on urbanism across sociology, psychology, geography and planning. It is probably the most commonly used reader across urban geography.

u/nickpickles · 3 pointsr/todayilearned

Well, there could be a lot of factors determining sub-par mass transit in an urban area. At the most basic level it could be lack of funding. In WA state we dealt with this over ten years ago with Tim Eyman's I-695 which in my area cut mass transit funding 50%. When you have a group of voters who say "fuck it" to funding bus/light rail you're going to have progressively worse service.

Another aspect is urban congestion. If you are running a bus line without dedicated lanes in a dense downtown region (or the center of an auto-centric sprawl city like Atlanta) it's going to back up and cause delayed routes, more gas consumption, and longer rides. Light rail, commuter rail, and BRT can move faster in most locations but require a larger investment (more money per mile of service, which won't happen if voters turn down taxes and bonds for it). Also factor in the continued sprawling out of cities like Phoenix, which requires more money to service fewer riders due to low density.

It's funny now because many cities are opting to re-implement the trolley lines they so quickly tore up in the 40's/50's/60's, albeit at a cost. When you had cities growing organically with an urban core that included housing followed by streetcar neighborhoods, the transportation system was integrated into the environment (you walked in downtown, took a streetcar to home/visit in the peripheral neighborhoods). The streetcars were tracked and had the right of way. When the cities tore the tracks up and placed their buses within the street traffic, which would become more congested than we could have ever imagined, in many cases we see them giving up a dedicated right of way for transit and forcing their vehicles right into the shark tank, so to say.

The post-war boom that fueled auto production/purchase coupled with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 swelled the streets with cars and kicked off the suburban sprawl that still persists today (although the numbers have lowered significantly since the 1990's and took a sharp decline since 2008). A few good books on these subjects include: Suburban Nation, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, and How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken Here are a few about specific cities with high amounts of sprawl that go into what factors caused this and the problems faced today: The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles and Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City (which I am reading right now and can say so far is a really interesting history of the city).

u/rr90013 · 3 pointsr/AskNYC

You should read Vanishing New York.

u/pm415 · 3 pointsr/ChapoTrapHouse

I'd throw out How To Kill A City by Peter Moskowitz.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MXXCDVV/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Helped clarify a lot for me about how gentrification works in U.S. cities and what needs to be done about housing. (Hint, it's tied directly to Reagan's public housing cuts and the rise of neo-liberalism).

u/TheFanciestWhale · 2 pointsr/urbandesign

This one is pretty good Zoning Rules! by William A. Fischel.
It touches on the economics of planning and explains a lot of the real issues that you deal with in the field... like why NIMBYism everywhere.

u/djm19 · 2 pointsr/LosAngeles

This is all just thinly veiled rambling. I don't know why you are getting so upset. Did I say I was part of the creative class moving into silver lake? No. I have lived in the east San Fernando Valley my whole life and dont intend to spend 600k on a shack in silverlake.

You are going on and on about national debt issues and the prison industrial complex. I am an urban planner by trade and education, so I offer you the theoretical, market historical context for gentrification.

I can also offer you some reading material if you are interested in this subject.

An easy read is "The Rent is Too Damn High" - This book discusses the economics of ever increasing property prices and rent, how our laws against density and building in general have betrayed lower income people.

"Naked City:The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places" - This book discusses that "authenticity" I was talking about that people are interested in now (btw, I never said I was seeking it). It also discusses gentrification's toll on the poor and its market based reality.

If you are interested in the creative class part, Richard Florida is an author always writing about that. Im not a huge fan of his though, for more general reasons. But when I say the creative class invades cheap neighborhoods is artistic and entrepreneurial skilled workers who bring their homes and maybe even their work to the area. This isn't a new thing, its happened through history, especially the past century. They are the pioneers of the gentrifying neighborhood before the people with the real money start entering.

u/lingual_panda · 2 pointsr/urbanplanning

Have you read Donald Shoup's essays on parking? He also has a book out but I won't read it until there's a kindle version.

u/michaelmacmanus · 2 pointsr/CitationsNeeded

The Real Estate Page As Colonial Dispatch

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Real Estate sections are mostly breezy, fun profiles of the super rich buying up houses and remodeling the ones they already own. Harmless escapist fun? Maybe. But how we write about real estate often reveals casually racist and colonial attitudes that are rarely, if ever, examined.


In this episode we talk about why the way we talk about the real estate business matters and how the white civilizing mission never went away. With guest Aaron Cantú.

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Show notes


Media and the ‘Melting Pot’: Putting a harmonious spin on gentrification

-Aaron Cantú | January 1, 2015 | FAIR

When NYT Real Estate Stories Read Like 19th Century Colonial Dispatches

-Adam Johnson | May 2, 2016 | FAIR

Media and the ‘Melting Pot’

-Adam Johnson | January 1, 2015 | FAIR

Party Like It’s 1992

-Bobby London | September 5, 2017 | The New Inquiry

Remembering The Lost Communities Buried Under Center Field

-Janice Llamoca | October 31, 2017 | NPR

Referenced


Upper Upper West Side Attracting New Settlers

-Philip S. Gutis | March 9, 1986 | The New York Times

Pulling Out of Fort Apache, the Bronx; New 41st Precinct Station House Leaves Behind Symbol of Community's Past Troubles

-Ian Fisher | June 23, 1993 | The New York Times

Veterans Remember 'Fort Apache'

-Larry McShane | June 30, 2002 | Associated Press

America's Next Great City Is Inside L.A.

Brett Martin | January 6, 2014 | GQ

Detroit: A New American Frontier

-Aaron Renn | July 20, 2011 | Yes! Magazine

Racist emails show Chicago official joked about 'safari' tour to see violence in black neighborhoods

-Ray Long & Todd Lighty | July 17, 2017 | Chicago Tribune

Everybody's Laughing at the Video of an Angry White Guy Claiming He 'Settled' Brooklyn

-September 23, 2015 | Vice

Recommendations

The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City [PDF]Neil Smith | 1996

Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit [PDF]Sara Safransky | August 17, 2014 | Geoforum

Is There Room for Black People in the New Detroit?Suzette Hackney | September 28, 2014 | Politico

The Permanent Crisis of Housing

-David Madden & Peter Marcuse | October 2, 2016 | Jacobin

The Steady Destruction of America’s Cities

-Gillian B. White | March 9, 2017 | The Atlantic

How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality and the Fight for the Neighborhood - Peter Moskowitz, Nation Books (2017)

The Works of Mike Davis

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iTunes link

Patreon Link

Official Site

u/stephentszuter · 2 pointsr/Columbus

Hah! Damned if you do, damned if you don't; we're all going to get priced out regardless. But that's another issue entirely. Good book on that topic.

u/tatertatertatertot · 2 pointsr/Economics

No.

Here's a book you should read:

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/dp/0307474372

>Nobody I know in my suburb is moving into the city.

Well, then, I guess all the data on recent urban demographics is wrong because of your anonymous anecdote!

u/Dranharelo · 2 pointsr/SimCity

plugs The Great Inversion as well

It's smart about not just despairing, and instead focuses on America's urban success stories, and how we can apply things we learn from them to core-less cities and suburbs.

u/Planner_Hammish · 2 pointsr/urbanplanning

Books:

How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall

A Better Way to Zone: Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities by Donald L. Elliott

Anything by Leon Krier (Architecture: Choice or Fate being my favorite) or William H. Whyte (The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces being my favorite)


Essays:

Jane Jacobs and the The Death and Life of American Planning by Thomas J. Campanella

Toward and Urban Design Manifesto by Allen Jacobs and Donald Appleyard.

u/HomelessJack · 1 pointr/povertyfinance

https://www.amazon.com/Regulating-Poor-Functions-Public-Welfare/dp/0679745165

Still the most cogent and definitive answer to the question you raise. Well, that and maybe this one too.

https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445684

u/jawaiah · 1 pointr/politics

Each one is necessary and useful but in its current form is too easily abused by centralized power, I think many people from across the political spectrum would agree on that. Right-libertarians think big business needs to be deregulated for those goals to succeed. Left-libertarians think big business needs to be cut off from its sources of privilege for those goals to succeed.

Taxation is the state's version of financial collaboration for projects. Right libertarians think taxation is stupid because it discourages huge businesses from making zonkers profits. Left libertarians think taxation is stupid but in general they don't prioritize things like tax breaks for corporations; the hugest corporations are the primary beneficiaries of state policies, and until we focus on stripping these billionaires of their modern aristocratic privilege it's hard call giving them tax cuts "libertarian" at all.

Universal health care would be great, the ACA is a long way from that. Right-libertarians would probably give you some stuff about "the most efficient healthcare is in a free market" and then just focus on relieving its burden to employers and healthcare business/insurance. Again big pharma, healthcare, and insurance are among the biggest beneficiaries of intellectual property monopoly, industry subsidy, and privateering "privatization" programs. As a left libertarian what stands out to me is that the whole paradigm of workers buying health insurance through their employers is absurd. Your employer does not buy the candles on your birthday cake, it doesn't make sense for health insurance either.

Welfare is a huge move in the right (left) direction, unfortunately state welfare has been abused by central power to manipulate the working masses. The state increases welfare funding in times of crisis and impending revolution, and squeezes the fund when it wants to ramp up production and generate a surplus of labor. It even resorts to propaganda campaigns to try to make surplus labor feel guilty about alleged sloth. This one is fresh in my mind, I'm reading an excellent book called Regulating the Poor: the Functions of Public Welfare.
But again cutting welfare is not the focus of left-libertarian thinking. I'm paraphrasing some blog I read a while back,

> ... it's like the state holds us down daily while big business comes and breaks our left leg with a baseball bat. The state gives us some crutches so we can still go to work for the big business, threatens taking away our crutches if we misbehave, and so on. Of course our first priority isn't gonna be "abolish our evil state crutches!" We're more concerned with the baseball bat.

u/NaturalDisplay · 1 pointr/canada

I think remote work might work to some extent, for some roles, but there is a force multiplier at play in "super-star" cities where all the top talent lives. Think SF/Manhattan/London. Full of people at the top of their industries, interacting with each other everyday, leading to massive network effects. Big, important, companies will always want to have a big presence in these centres, and any jobs they can push remotely are just going to be next on the out-source / automation chopping block.

The New Urban Crisis is a good book on this phenomenom, and it happens to be written by a Rotman prof.

u/The_Rope · 1 pointr/peacecorps

In preparation for my Community Development position in Albania I've recently started a book called Community Development in Action. So far it's talked a bit about different approaches to education so it might have some application to your upcoming service (if not your primary work then maybe secondary projects you might become involved in).

https://www.amazon.com/Community-Development-Action-Putting-Practice/dp/1847428754/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

u/Davin900 · 1 pointr/nyc

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
http://amzn.com/0307272745

u/yesimhavingfun · 1 pointr/Brooklyn
u/tuna_safe_dolphin · 1 pointr/todayilearned

I never said 100% of them do it either. While there are probably dozens of books that cover this topic, I'd recommend this one which I've read: http://www.amazon.com/Death-American-Jewish-Community-ebook/dp/B007X78PFA/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1

tl;dr real estate agents/brokers are mostly scumbags.

u/ejpusa · 1 pointr/nyc

PLEASE do do some fact checking before jumping on the Bloomberg bandwagon.


RNC 2004, Bloomberg has NYPD arrest +2000 protestors (many were not doing any protesting, just crossing the street). Locks up everyone in barbwire topped cages. Like a zoo. City loses biggest lawsuit in history. NYC $taxpayers out $17M.

Marijuana arrests: not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands were arrested for simple posession under his term. Not a ticket, you went to jail.

Just think about that for a moment, able to put up barbwire cages in NYC in a week, arrests over 2000 people.

Has no issues arresting hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers for something he has a problem with.

And now he wants to take everyones guns away?

Not sure how popular he's going to be.

Destroying the heart and soul of NYC. How he did it, step by step.

It's just a wasteland now of chain drug store fronts and banks. Sure tourists areas are nice, but what about the rest of us?

https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-New-York-Great-City/dp/0062439693/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536942693&sr=8-1&keywords=vanishing+new+york+how+a+great+city+lost+its+soul+by+jeremiah+moss

But he was pretty good with tech, if that counts.