(Part 2) 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 products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/the-new-suburban-poverty/
http://www.amazon.com/Once-American-Dream-Inner-Ring-Metropolitan/dp/159213937X
http://urbanportal.org/issues/entry/suburbia_question/
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16t4c093
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/05/death-america-suburban-dream-ferguson-missouri-resegregation
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/21/suburban-ghettos-like-ferguson-are-ticking-time-bombs/
Interestingly, Ferguson, Missouri is one of these once wealthy, now poor inner-ring suburbs.
https://i.imgur.com/E2OoaTJ.png
Found on page 22 in Myron Levine's book.
I'm not an educator, I'm a parent and have looked into this a bit. There is a good book that I learned about from a Bill Gates TED talk.
http://www.amazon.com/Educational-Economics-Where-School-Funds/dp/0877667640
Part of the problem isn't the total amount of money spent, its that a lot of that total comes with strings attached. Sure, you get x amount of money to run a DARE program, but that won't help kids read and is of questionable benefit. Want to question the benefit and use the money for something else needed and proven - you can't because the money is earmarked. This is one of the reasons why a wealthy district can spend less money, because it's their money they can allocate it how they want.
Gentrification moves in two waves. It's well documented.
Basically poor, usually young people with education, artistic and handyman skills and time move into an area and start modestly fixing buildings up. This group tends to live in some harmony—or maybe détente—with longtime resident population, usually the working class and people of color.
Over time, first wave gentrifiers make a neighborhood "safe" for rich kids, young professionals, wealthy eccentrics and others who like to slum it (but not really) and we transition into second wave gentrification as developers create difficulties for original residents and first wave gentrifiers, who then are forced out.
The Meadowlark building downtown is a little microcosm of this. It used to be an extreme shithole, with like a Bosnian restaurant in the basement and a couple of studios. A local artist literally cleaned up the building for his studio and now what is it? It's mostly a boring office park for 9-5ers. Someone put a bird on it.
Eventually gentrified areas lose their character and become dorky and some other area will become the trendy neighborhood.
You can already see it happening again in the areas Bixby mentions, but also traditionally working class and Mexican-American neighborhoods of north Moorhead.
So it goes.
Here's just some random books:
"Monthly review" school defenses of China:
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Hegemony-Assessing-Prospects-Multipolar/dp/1842777092
https://www.amazon.com/Reorienting-19th-Century-Economy-Continuing/dp/1612051243
https://www.amazon.com/Adam-Smith-Beijing-Lineages-Century/dp/1844672980
these are all the same book summarized here
https://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013/
leftist criticisms:
https://www.amazon.com/China-Demise-Capitalist-World-Economy/dp/158367182X
https://www.amazon.com/China-Socialism-Market-Reforms-Struggle/dp/1583671234
basically summarized here:
http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economies%205430-6430/Hart-Landsberg-China%20and%20Transnational%20Accumulation.pdf
some important books on the cultural revolution and the conflict between Mao and Deng at a materialist level rather than in relation to personality (there are very few)
https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Economic-Development-Chris-Bramall/dp/0415373484
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/red-chinas-green-revolution/9780231186674
https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/2356/D_Jiang_Hongsheng_a_201005.pdf
(if you can read French it's been published as a much shorter book)
some general books on imperialism and some of the things I'm talking about
https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Slums-Mike-Davis/dp/1784786616
https://www.amazon.com/Imperialism-Twenty-First-Century-Globalization-Super-Exploitation/dp/1583675779
both of these are a bit ambiguous on China
and about Marx and the first international
https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Third-World-Umberto-Melotti/dp/0333198174
as for the USSR and Bukharin/Stalin/Trotsky representing different lines, that should be easy enough to find. The one thing we don't lack are defenses of the USSR and Marxism-Leninism.
You can see which side I'm on based on the books I recommend so don't take me for a neutral observer. If someone knows a good book defending China based on Marxism (rather than Amin and co.'s eclecticism) I welcome it. There's Losurdo of course but that doesn't really interest me since it's a defense of China in terms of Marxist thought rather than an empirical investigation. Not that it's not valuable, just that the argument should be familiar to everyone already since it has become predominant on this sub.
I would recommend Krumholz or Forester (see also Planning in the Face of Power )
Hypothetically, this is the best, albeit least realistic option for Toronto to truly flourish.
It has however been well thought out in a very good and somewhat recent book called Urban Nation. Check it out!
Your heart is in the right place, but your numbers are backwards.
Transit users are not the big beneficiaries of road spending as wealth redistribution. By far and away, drivers, especially rural drivers, are the beneficiaries, and city dwellers, especially city pedestrains, are the ones who pay. The whole north American road funding system acts as a giant vacuum, sucking money out of cities and disturbing to rural and suburban areas, sucking money out of people who demand little of the road and handing a fat subsidy to everyone who buys a SUV.
Some reading:
http://www.amazon.ca/Shape-Suburbs-Understanding-Torontos-Sprawl/dp/0802095879
I would second this, for sure.
Consider also The New Urban Sociology by Gottdiener and Hutchison, and generally anything by Mark Gottdiener. This does not directly address idea generation, so much as urban culture and the changing nature of cities. In that respect, it deals with how culture and politics shape urban life.
If you want to go back to some classical theory, you could check into Durkheim (collective effervescence) and any contemporary literature in the same vein.
https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Local-Government-Planning-3rd/dp/0873261712
i found a used copy for 25 on ebay, so look around. the 3rd is the most recent, i'm not certain how different the 2nd and 3rd are. honestly probably not that much, but who knows.
https://www.amazon.ca/Creating-New-City-Sandy-Springs/dp/1425954367/
Traffic congestion has been a problem since the days of New Amsterdam! This was something that the city fathers meant to address for years, and finally did after the end of the American Revolution, when the city was growing at an unprecedented pace. John Randel, Jr. was commissioned to survey the structures on Manhattan, which became the basis for the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. Here is a great zoomable copy that was created between 1818 and 1820; it has the 1820 street grid superimposed on top of it. You should check out The Measure of Manhattan, which offers a history of John Randel, Jr. and the execution and expansion of the grid.
Most of the urban planning in the city has involved altering the present grid, and extending it and modifying it for the other boroughs (to varying degrees). The grid has evolved in response to transportation advances, but there are obviously limitations because of simple geography. Trucks choke the streets south of 14th Street because there are several separate grids at play. One of the most interesting things I’ve learned is that there are two separate grids denoting the De Lancey and Rutger estates; the De Lancey grid is perpendicular to the Bowery, while the Rutgers grid is perpendicular to Division Street, which led to the Bowery; these grids reflect the direction of commerce in these particular areas. The 1811 grid is somewhat more static, but as I mentioned before, there have been several notable changes over the past 200 years. If you want to check out some online maps of the city, check out the David Rumsey Map Collection; it has close-up maps of the different city wards if you wanted to focus your research on a particular neighborhood.
To study traffic patterns, one must be familiar with the earliest forms of transportation in the city. The personal wagons of merchants and the carriages of the wealthy shared space with cattle being herded down the streets, and wild hogs foraging about (a tremendous problem up until the 19th Century). In the early 1800s came the omnibus, which was a carriage with multiple seats inside; they began to operate on all major thoroughfares and streets quickly, connecting uptown residents with their downtown businesses and the ports with fast packet ships and freighters moving West through the Erie canal. In the 1830s, railroads reached down into Manhattan, further revolutionizing transportation in the city, but of course the tracks often competed with the other street vehicles. The elevated trains were built in the 1870s and 80s, freeing up space on the streets below; streetcars were also spreading throughout the city, adding to the chaos. The subway, opening in 1904, alleviated congestion a bit, but as you can see, many of the modern problems we have with traffic are not quite as modern as we think. Cars and trucks further added to the traffic nightmare that is quintessentially New York. The construction of the highways that ring Manhattan and in many cases cut through entire outer borough neighborhoods did help congestion, but as we have seen in the past 80 years, they are not without their problems. I would recommend New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development for further information regarding urban development in the 20th Century.
Hope that helped a bit. Good luck on your project!
Exploding Mangoes was the first book I read about Pakistan. Here's a list:
A little dry for my taste but I couldn't recommend this more. This book charts the social consequences of state policies and economic factors over the whole time period from '47 to now.
Very important book if you want to avoid the conspiracy theories floating about Taliban and our role in their rise.
Interested in Pakistan army's relationship with mullahs over the years? This is a must-read.
Title is self explanatory.
A very informative and interesting two part series on what joins the non-Arab muslims of the world, with a large portion about Pakistan. Written by Nobel Laureate for Literature Naipaul, behnoi of Maj. Gen. Ameer Faisal Alvi who was assassinated in 2008 in Islamabad.
A good overview of what makes Pakistan run the way it does.
Haven't read it but have heard good things about it.
Haven't read it yet.
Which are the last two? Assuming capitalist development and codes...
By far the most famous geographer studying global capitalism is David Harvey. He recently wrote The Enigma of Capital which is a pretty easy introduction to his work. I think his Spaces of Global Capitalism is a more useful summation. He's very famous for a few other books, but I think the most important work he's done is in The Limits to Capital. The last one is a tough, meticulous book. Also worth checking out is his protege Neil Smith, either his Uneven Development or for a focus on cities The New Urban Frontier.
There really are not many books that take up housing and building code specifically, though Ben-Joseph's The City of Code is a useful introduction. If you're looking for a good rant (and a reliable one) on how we got to the less-than-stellar spatial arrangements of American cities, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere will get your blood pumping. If you're more interested in the cultural politics of place, one of my all time favorites is Landscapes of Privilege by the Duncan's.
Need this book as a pdf file or link!! Paying $2 PayPal!
https://www.amazon.com/Public-Administration-Introduction-Marc-Holzer/dp/0765639114/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
India is an example; I do have experience in third world countries, Tanzania, specifically, but I chose India as an example because it is better known and because, in terms of population and its poverty, it has less to give its children in rural regions than Tanzania does.
>The reported results from RI seem about expected - based on the level of poverty of its students [...]
Again, for some reason we are equating stupidity/inability to learn with poverty, and this is just not so. It creates a system where it's ok for the middle and upper classes to just say, "Well, they're poor, we can't expect them to do well in school." It's unfair to do so.
There are schools which perform well under terrible conditions. If you're interested in specifics, there are a couple of books/studies I could point you too. I could also point you to a bunch of studies that show that affluence can have nothing to do with a student's success. Hell, in India, there are states which have terrible literacy rates (59% in Bihar) and fantastic rates (90+% in Kerala). The variations in terms of funding for public, rural education do not differ much there.
Let me give you an Tanzanian example; it is consistently in the bottom 25 poorest nations on earth. In its urban center of Dar es Salaam, the study I'm looking at (1992, unfortunately), shows a illiteracy rate of 2%. Kigoma, a rural province, having an illiteracy rate of 20%. The country, at that time, had a total literacy rate of approx 10%. (http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/13/20/09.pdf). Now, given their economy has since collapsed (again), one would question as to whether their educational systems (limited to literacy) would have also shrunk. It has. But with a country so poor, its literacy rate wavers around 70%. (WorldFactbook). This is 15% better than this Rhode Island city, where the standard of living, the 'educator's' credentials, school facilities are all exponentially better.
So, as for Rhode Island, no, I don't know what was happening at that school. I don't think anyone does. The argument I'm making is that they should be fired for incompetence. The argument the superintendent made was that they were acting together to prevent more help being given to students and demanded too much compensation.
I'm not a free-market capitalist, but I do think that when you do not perform your job adequately, and then team-up against ideas that will benefit the students you are supposed to care for, you are unworthy of your salary and of your position.
Check out: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Schools-Poor-Neighborhoods-Demographics/dp/087766742X
> Standard of living can be defined as:
Lol, I was just going to start off by saying it depends on what you mean by better!
> I think most would agree that Sweden has a greater standard of living than Nigeria. Which is better at creating these types of standard of living increases?
> Is Capitalism or Socialism better at moving humans to a greater standard of living?
First of all, no socialist that I know of, or even suspect that exists in this community, would deny that capitalism is fantastic at things like wealth creation. Of course capitalism has brought many good things to us. And of course, the corollary of that is true as well.
Still, among many of the factors you site, however, I can tell you as an academic economist, many of these are hotly debated as to how and in what ways they can be said to reflect the health of society as a whole. GDP for example is a notoriously bad gauge to quantify societal well-being (if you want a sample of the basic controversy).
In the US, we have so much of an abundance of capital and wealth that if we desired, we could virtually if not entirely, eliminate many of the facets of poverty in our country. We could provide low-cost affordable housing to everybody (see some of the history of housing policy in the US), even despite our horrible attempts at pubic housing in the past. So why can't/hasn't capitalism accommodated a solution for this niche problem? Well, capitalism doesn't produce for the social need or utility, it produces for profit and individual consumption.
Capitalism doesn't allocate resources to areas it can't profit off of, unless someone can turn it to a profit.
I'll pay $5 for a pdf (and/or epub) of the following book:
Stoecker, Randy R., Research Methods for Community Change, 2nd Edition, ISBN: 9781412994057Thank you for any help