Urban Planning

Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks and their accessibility. Many professional practitioners of urban planning, especially practitioners with the title "urban planner" study urban planning education, while some paraprofessional practitioners are educated in urban stud ...more

Most Read This Week Tagged "Urban Planning"

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back

Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town

The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back

Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It

Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It

Gentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration

Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource

More most read this week tagged "urban planning"...

Urban Planning Books

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)

How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

More urban planning books...

Lists

Public Transportation and Why It Is Awesome

123 books — 10 voters

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

Bibliography for Walkable City

52 books — 1 voter

Urban Studies & Planning

42 books — 1 voter

The Peoples of Philadelphia by Allen F. Davis

Philadelphia Books

17 books — 5 voters

A Pattern Language by Christopher W. Alexander

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Urban Planning/Social Ecology

113 books — 11 voters

101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School by Matthew Frederick

Place, Space and Design Bookclub Berlin

27 books — 4 voters

Related Genres

Architecture
Geography
Cities
Urban Planning
Urban Design

Urban Policy
House Building
Rural Planning
Regional Planning

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Quotes Tagged “Urban Planning”

“ A border--the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory--forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence. ...more ”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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“ The United States could not win the war if blacks continued as sharecroppers down South. The South was not an important area either politically or economically as far as the internationalists were concerned. (“The white South,” Myrdal wrote, “is itself a minority and a national problem.”) It was important only as a source of much-needed labor, at a time when most white southerners concurred because they no longer needed them to chop or harvest cotton and considered migration a simple solution to The United States could not win the war if blacks continued as sharecroppers down South. The South was not an important area either politically or economically as far as the internationalists were concerned. (“The white South,” Myrdal wrote, “is itself a minority and a national problem.”) It was important only as a source of much-needed labor, at a time when most white southerners concurred because they no longer needed them to chop or harvest cotton and considered migration a simple solution to their biggest social problem. The foundations which did the thinking for the internationalist ruling class quickly realized that that flow of labor into the factories of the industrial North was impeded less by the system of political segregation in the South than by what they would eventually term the de-facto housing segregation in the North, which meant, in effect, the existence of residential patterns based on ethnic neighborhoods. The logistics problem facing Louis Wirth and his colleagues in the psychological-warfare establishment was not so much how to move the black up from the South — the wage differential and the railroads would accomplish that — but rather where to put him when he got there. Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia were essentially an assemblage of neighborhoods arranged as ethnic fiefdoms, dominated at that time by the most recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the Irish and Germans. As Wirth makes clear in his sociological writings, any group that has this kind of cohesiveness and population density had political power, and the question in his mind was precisely whether this political power was going to be used in the interests of the WASP ruling elite, who needed these people to fight a war that had nothing approaching majority support among ethnics of the sort Wirth viewed with suspicion. This group of “ethnic” Americans posed a problem for the psychological-warfare establishment because it posed a problem to the ethnic group that made up that establishment. This group of people constituted a Gestalt - ethnic, Catholic, unionized, and urban - whose mutual and reinforcing affiliations effectively removed them from the influence of instruments of mass communication which the psychological-warfare establishment saw as critical in controlling them. If one added the demographic increase this group enjoyed — as Catholics they were forbidden to use contraceptives — it is easy enough to see that their increase in political power posed a threat to WASP hegemony over the culture at precisely the moment when the WASP elite was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with fascism. It was Wirth’s job to bring them under control, lest they jeopardize the war effort. ...more ”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

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