In 2009, theatre artist Aaron Landsman was dragged by a friend to a city council meeting in Portland, Oregon. At first he was bored, but when a citizen dumped trash in front of the council in order to show how the city needed cleaning up, he was...

TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITIONWINNER OF THE GREEN PRIZE FOR SUSTAINABLE LITERATUREUpdated with 100+ pages of new material and a foreword by Janette Sadik-KhanThe bestselling urban planning book of the past decade, translated into seven languages, Walkable...

Shortlisted for the Architectural Book of the YearHow gentrification is killing our cities, and what we can do about itWhat does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question...

A cutting exploration of how cities drive climate change while being on the frontlines of the coming climate crisisHow will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the...

"For many decades, "social revolutions" have been a major focus of social scientific work. Defined by Theda Skocpol in her classic work States and Social Revolutions as "rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures that are...

Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in the United States. Yet few have probed American cities’ dependence on municipal debt or how the terms of municipal finance structure racial privileges, entrench spatial neglect, elide...

Majora Carter shows how brain drain cripples low-status communities and maps out a development strategy focused on talent retention to help them break out of economic stagnation."My musical, In the Heights, explores issues of community, gentrification,...

Rethinking the open cityPlanners, privatisation, and police surveillance are laying siege to urban public spaces. The streets are becoming ever more regimented as life and character are sapped from our cities. What is to be done? Is it possible to...

The “profound . . . brilliant” account of the rise of the world’s slums and the failures of modern urbanization—by the world’s leading urbanist (Arundhati Roy, activist and Booker Prize–winning author) According to the United Nations, more than one...

A cutting-edge, solutions-oriented analysis of how we can reimagine cities around the world to build sustainable futures.   What would it take to make urban places greener, more affordable, more equitable, and healthier for everyone? In recent years,...

Reissue of the classic text on how cities should be plannedWhen first published in 1970, The Uses of Disorder, was a call to arms against the deadening hand of modernist urban planning upon the thriving chaotic city. Written in the aftermath of the 1968...

A 2021 C. Wright Mills Award FinalistShows how government created “ghettos” and affluent white space and entrenched a system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality—and issues a call for abolition.The iconic Black hood, like...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY • AN OPRAH DAILY BEST...

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Best Book of the Year Award in 2011“A masterpiece.” —Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics“Bursting with insights.” —The New York Times Book ReviewA pioneering urban economist presents a...

This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is “as central to the L.A. canon as anything that . . . Joan Didion wrote in the seventies” (New Yorker)No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los...

Infinite Suburbia is the culmination of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism's yearlong study of the future of suburban development. Extensive research, an exhibition, and a conference at MIT's Media Lab, this groundbreaking...

“Cities are the future of the human race, and Jeff Speck knows how to make them work.”—David Owen, staff writer at the New YorkerNearly every US city would like to be more walkable—for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment—yet few are taking the...

"A revelation of the drive and creative flux of the metropolis over time."--NatureA sweeping history of cities through the millennia--from Mesopotamia to Manhattan--and how they have propelled Homo sapiens to dominance.Six thousand years ago, there were...

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since the end of World War II. This tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside is not simply an expression of our...

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you...