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

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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

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Lists

Urban Planning and Planning Adjacent

32 books — 1 voter

In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Asian architecture/design/urban planning

50 books — 2 voters

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Top Urban Planning Books of All Time

115 books — 158 voters

Illustrated History of Landscape Design by Elizabeth Boults

Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society by Frederick Law Olmsted

Best of Landscape Architecture (nonfiction)

61 books — 9 voters

Twilight of the Belle Epoque by Mary McAuliffe

Paris as a City: non-fiction

43 books — 12 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

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”

“ Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure. ”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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“ As a group which believed in civic responsibility and the salutary effect of applied social science, it was natural that the WASP elite would take an interest in housing. In cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, the panels of experts in the housing field invariably had a definite ethnic cast. They became certified as experts either by going to the already mentioned Ivy League universities or by getting appointed to boards of the various cities’ planning commissions, which were As a group which believed in civic responsibility and the salutary effect of applied social science, it was natural that the WASP elite would take an interest in housing. In cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, the panels of experts in the housing field invariably had a definite ethnic cast. They became certified as experts either by going to the already mentioned Ivy League universities or by getting appointed to boards of the various cities’ planning commissions, which were often descendants of local ruling class initiatives that began with the city-beautiful movement or the settlement house movement around the time of World War I. The Philadelphia Housing Association was one such group. It started off as a blueblood organization complaining about backyard privies and piggeries in South Philadelphia and recommending common-sense measures for local improvement of the housing situation, things like liens against absentee landlords to pay for repairs. All of that changed in 1937 with the New Deal housing act of that year, which established local housing authorities across the country with federal money and government authority. The various housing authorities were charged with creating master plans by staffs of “experts” of a certain ethnic (i.c., WASP) cast which was invariably not the ethnic cast of the neighborhoods which were targeted for destruction. Urban renewal as practiced in the case of Berman v. Parker meant that certain people were empowered to come up with a master plan for the cities, one that would now have the power of law, specifically eminent domain, behind it along with enormous amounts of federal money, which was made available to tear down neighborhoods where people from other ethnic groups lived. The experts could do this according to their own purportedly scientific but ultimately ethnocentric criteria of things like blight, hygiene, decay, etc. Taken together the WASP penchant for meddling in housing along with residual WASP anti-Catholicism meant bad news for places like Bridesburg and Poletown, especially when this group was empowered to act on its ethnic prejudices by federal money and a Supreme Court that was willing to abridge property rights in the interest of increased social engineering. ...more ”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

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