A Burglar's Guide to the City

by Geoff Manaugh

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again.At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city.With the help of FBI Special Agents, reformed bank robbers, private security consultants, the L.A.P.D. Air Support Division, and architects past and present, the book dissects the built environment from both sides of the law. Whether picking padlocks or climbing the walls of high-rise apartments, finding gaps in a museum's surveillance routine or discussing home invasions in ancient Rome, A Burglar's Guide to the City has the tools, the tales, and the x-ray vision you need to see architecture as nothing more than an obstacle that can be outwitted and undercut.Full of real-life heists-both spectacular and absurd-A Burglar's Guide to the City ensures readers will never enter a bank again without imagining how to loot the vault or walk down the street without planning the perfect getaway.

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, Crime, History, True Crime, Cities, Urban Planning

306 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 17, 2015

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm going to save you some time and give you the entire takeaway from this book here: Burglars do not use the architectural features of buildings as they were intended, often going through walls, ceilings or floors to gain entry.

Instead of creative capers, the of author A Burglar's Guide to the City gives us mundane stories about police ride alongs and interviews he conducted. This book would better be titled, "My experiences researching a book about burglary."

A great deal of space, for instance, is given to the world of hobby lock pickers and the author's own efforts to learn the skill. At the end of it all he informs us lock picking is irrelevant because burglars don't bother with picking locks, they force entry or find other means of getting into a building. Then why include this information at all?

When actual crimes are mentioned, they are given brief space and left me wanting more details. It felt as if more time was spent explaining the fictional plots of films and books than of real-life crimes.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been putting this off because there are two types of reviews that I like to write: those where I loved the book and want to sing its praises, and those where I really despised it and can't wait to tear it to pieces. When a book is just ... mediocre ... I can't get up the energy to bother to say anything.

I mean, I pre-ordered this book. Don't even remember how I came across it, but I read the blurb on Amazon - "At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is an unexpected and thrilling insight: how any building transforms when seen through the eyes of someone hoping to break into it. Studying architecture the way a burglar would, Geoff Manaugh takes readers through walls, down elevator shafts, into panic rooms, up to the buried vaults of banks, and out across the rooftops of an unsuspecting city" and I was like "OH MAN I GOTS TO READ THAT."

Technically all those things were in there in much the same way that onion and pepper and other spices and some savory fat and unique cuts of meat are in haggis, and I have about as much attraction to the end product now that I know how it's put together.

honestly I'm being too hard on haggis here. I've never eaten it. I would totally try it.

aaaaaanyway Manaugh's prose is slow and repetitive. The book is small in dimensions, but does stretch to 275 pages. If you read it you'll be treated to passages like:

"Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from my conversation with Toner was the implication that the fear of being burglarized while everyone was away from home at the chariot races helped to catalyze the growth of a metropolitan police force."

so far so good. Then:

"Without all those quiet streets and empty homes to protect, armed guards on specifically timed, routine patrols would not have become such an urgent necessity then in urban history."

which is pretty much the same thing as the first section, but okay, fine. Then continuing on to

"It's as if the city itself, and the behaviors and institutions through which it was regulated, coalesced around the activities of criminals, like irritating grains of sand around which an oyster gradually grows its pearls. Burglary, placed in the expanded context of thousands of years of urban development, helped to catalyze a kind of evolutionary cat-and-mouse game through which cops and robbers inadvertently collaborated, reacting to one another and shaping the legal, fictional, and literal dimensions of the built environment."

The whole book is built upon these overwrought redundancies.

oh well. Hey, like with many books I could say that it's not really the book's fault. It's my idea of what the book was going to be about that wasn't met. I was expecting something more fantastical, an unstoppable wave of analyses of actual burglaries with diagrams and granular detail on the planning and equipment used and how the cops eventually caught them, and ... I dunno. There were a few of those in the book but they felt flaccid compared with what I imagined would be in there, and they were surrounded by unending pages of discussion about the act of going through a wall instead of a door, or what the legal definition of burglary is, or anecdotes about riding in a police helicopter in LA and seeing old television film sets.

Ultimately? I thought I ordered skirt steak with chimichurri and a nice glass of red, got lungs and hearts stuffed into a stomach and served with room temperature water instead.

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to give this book a higher rating. I heard Manaugh interviewed on NPR and was looking forward to the book. It needed to be shorter, by at least a 25%. If it had been, I would have given it 5 stars. The information was delivered well, it just needed to be tighter. He should shop for a better editor.

[Max]

Well-researched, full of great anecdotes and interesting architectural information. As a card-carrying nerd, I would have appreciated a bit more information on the background and origins of the weird spaces and architectural loopholes burglars exploit: the history of drywall construction, for example, or how and why tunnel systems are created and how and why they can be forgotten. I wanted this to be a monumental volume, a kind of anti-Seeing Like a State—Seeing like a Radical, Seeing like a Criminal—and it’s *almost* there, but not quite. (Some of that’s due to the unavoidable lack of documentary evidence—Scott’s aided in SLAS by the fact that state agencies track documentation like slugs track slime, which is... less true of burglars.) I’d also have welcomed a chapter on other “unorthodox” uses of urban space, like parkour or geocaching. But, admittedly, these are way beyond the title’s remit. (Though there is a cool detour into video game design...) Burglar’s Guide focuses more on individual user stories and their implications, and contains a wealth of raw material. (Plus, Roofman!) Also, the prose has tics: under no circumstances should you take a shot every time the writer introduces an anecdote with “Think of...” (An especially weird turn of phrase, since how are we supposed to think of a thing if we don’t know about it; that kind of shared-knowledge oh-of-course-we’ve-all-heard-about method of relating a story denies us the kind of specificity and clarity that would have made this book really sing.) Definitely worth a read, but maybe not as a chaser to John MacPhee and Rebecca Solnit.

[Leo Knight · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a stunningly dull and repetitive book. It has about one chapter's worth of information, stretched and padded to over 200 pages. The author will write a perfectly pleasant, informative paragraph, nicely summing up a topic. Then, he will follow up with three or four more paragraphs, restating the same ideas and sentiments. At several points, I laughed out loud at his literary acrobatics, desperately re-wrapping the same packages. I finally gave up, skimmed the rest, and found more of the same.

The author does give a few hints and glimpses of fascinating tales of heists, but fails to deliver. My old history teacher called this writing style, "glowing generalities." It's almost like reading a collection of reviews and articles about the book, instead of the book itself. Very disappointed.

[Fredrik deBoer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun and inventive, I just wish this text stuck a little closer to its central conceit, which is something I've talked about with other books before. The reviews here are generally too mean and oddly aggrieved, which happens on Goodreads, but I do think that the general observation that there's a little too much padding and digression here is correct. I think reviewers often fail to understand exactly what publishing companies want, not just in terms of overall length but in terms of chapter length and consistency from chapter to chapter, which often militates towards more where less would have sufficed. There is a great deal of interesting and (for lack of a better term) charming research here, and I think Manaugh's approach of looking at the city through eyes alien to the average reader makes a compelling thesis in and of itself. What some of the reviews here seem to miss is that he's not really asking you to see the city like a burglar, but trying to train you in how to understand architecture and engineering in terms other than those dictated by architects and engineers. The book is frequently very effective in that regard.

Is it indeed 50 pages too long? Yeah.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to love this book and thought I was going to from the opening chapter but it meanders. The author is weirdly repetitive at times (e.g., the author is weirdly repetitive at times) and the book can't seem to figure out if it wants to be pop science or more philosophical architecture discussion. Regularly swapping between the two means neither ever quite gets fleshed out.

That said, I liked a lot of it and it gave me a couple of ideas about how to improve our house's security, so I can't complain.

[Bibliovoracious · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great heist stories folded into a mix of history, architecture and society.

Loved it! I was impressed at the diversity of topics it's possible to touch when going deep into one thing.

It could definitely inspire some paranoia, since it swiftly cracks the illusion of personal/home "security", and I learned many things I didn't know I didn't know about (lock-picking societies?).

[Patrick Hunnius]

Pretentious, repetitive and oddly self-congratulatory. I gave up a quarter of the way through.

[Atila Iamarino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um livro curioso em cima de uma boa premissa: como um ladrão vê uma cidade. E entrega exatamente isso, como bandidos usam diferentes partes de construções para fazer um assalto. De fechaduras a cofres, de túneis a saídas de emergência, achei um livro bem legal e inesperado.

Ele não romantiza assaltantes, mas explica como precisam pensar de forma diferente para explorar vulnerabilidades e ver a arquitetura de outra forma. Em especial, curti a forma como analisou o Die Hard como um dos filmes mais arquitetônicos, já que McClane explora o prédio de várias formas, por dutos, passagens, em cima do elevador, menos da convencional.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It's a combination between psychological/criminological information on burglars and architectural theories/elements that allow them to move around the environment. It's an awesome combination of theory and practice and covers a lot of things I am directly interested in, as a criminology student. I would recomend it to everyone, but especially those with a keen interest in criminology or architecture, becausr it really is a joy to read.

Yes it has shortcomings, most notably the author's sense of self worth and his opinion on how funny he is, but I could easily surpass that. This book is not just about how burglars don't use buildings in the way they were inteded: it's also about how to position your house in a neighbourhood in order to maximize the chance of it never being broken into, how to pick locks and how to rob banks. Sometimes you have to ignore the author's "voice" and maybe for once concentrate on his "message". Because I got a lot of super interesting stuff out of it, it's a 5 star for me.

[Thom · Rating 2 out of 5]

The point repeated often through this book is that burglars do not use the architectural features of most buildings at they were intended. Additional locks on the door are not much use if they can go through the wall, the ceiling or the floor. Chapters are spent discussing tunnels, roof jobs, and holing up within a Toys R Us. The book begins and ends with George Leonidas Leslie, an architect turned burglar.

Extraneously, the author rode along in LAPD helicopters, looking at street layouts but mostly gathering anecdotes. Also contained here are non-thorough discussions of what breaking and entering is, and how laws vary state by state. A large chapter is taken up with a discussion of amateur lock picking and the author's attempts to learn the skill - which has little to do with the title.

Several actual crimes are mentioned, but none in thorough detail. This book is better for it's bibliography.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Long essays are probably best suited to magazines, except for the fact that there really aren't magazines anymore; longform articles aren't great for the short attention-span of the net, and they certainly aren't very good when stretched out to book length. Here we have a case of the latter.

An intriguing premise-- that there is an alternate way to contextualize our habitat, through the eyes of the burglar, the intruder, the outsider-- gets any reader right into the thick of the discussion.
'Architects love to think they’re the only ones truly concerned about the built environment. It is equal parts self-pity and arrogance, despair and pride. If architects are to be believed, no one but them pays any attention to the buildings around them. But what became increasingly clear during my research for this book is that some of the most interesting responses to a building, whether it’s a high-rise apartment or an art museum, don’t come from architects at all, but from the people who are hoping to rob it. The people who case its doors and windows, who slink down its halls looking for surveillance cameras, who wait at all odd hours of the day and night to find rhythms of vulnerability in the way a building is used or guarded...'

Really very interesting, and various publications and magazines have hosted excerpts of Manaugh's book already, more manageably in article format. Where we go wrong here is in the inevitable stretching-out procedure that gets a one-trick magazine article into book form. While the factoids and micro-bits of info are there, as we may expect, in force, the sheer size seems to promise more. The language employed virtually seems to guarantee it. We have the expectation of unlocking secret back alleyways of the built world, and maybe even uncovering some buried hypothesis that is hiding in plain sight, written right on the surface of our dense civilization's elaborate exteriors. Or interiors.

'Burglary has an uncanny spatial power, forcing us to rethink fundamental beliefs we might have about the built environment, from how we define a house to the way we might choose to move from one floor to another within a building. This is because burglary, as we’ve seen, requires architecture: without an inside and an outside, there is no such thing as burglary...'

Yes. Very good from the moving-deck-chairs-around perspective, but not much actually gets said as the pages turn and turn. Mr. Manaugh seems in awe of the casually-deployed metaphor, and just can't stop riding one hobby horse in particular: in nearly every paragraph of the book the word 'architecture' is reused, reinterpreted in some new and presumably daring way to mean the universal built environment while specifically describing some small facet of same. Or of something entirely unrelated. An umbrella term for all weather, that becomes neither more meaningful nor more clever with every redeployment.

Brighter spots are found with the smaller fare--those factoids and historical blips that research has turned up: '...Marc Weber Tobias points out, for example, that older combination locks had a significant vibrational vulnerability—they could be vibrated into opening. “This was such a pervasive problem,” he writes, that during long ocean crossings, these “safes used to open themselves on some ships.” The “constant engine tremors” would simply be “transmitted to wheel packs through the metal of the vessel,” and the safes would just swing open, as if picked by the swaying of the waves...'

Another interesting segment concerns itself with the way that commercial environment designers have learned to lead the consumer through a maze that suits their needs: 'The question of how deep architectural interiors can be monitored and controlled extends far beyond the realm of the residential. Museums, hotels, and casinos, not mention pieces of urban infrastructure, such as subways, train stations, and even streets themselves, have almost imperceptibly been transformed into unwitting film studios, recorded not by Hollywood equipment but the high tech gear of the security industry. Surveillance cameras blur the line not just between public and private, but between architectural structures and optical installations, turning entire casino interiors, for example, into carefully designed stage sets specifically meant to steer you in front of the lens...' Even here, though, Manaugh cannot resist the umbrella-metaphor he'd like to impose. The Hollywood movie. Okay. Sort of.

A more action packed-- okay the only action packed-- segment finds Manaugh in a police helicopter roving above Los Angeles at night: '... This was the anticipatory geography of crime, where the helicopter crew’s job was to preempt any possibility of escape: to guess where the suspect might go next and to have police officers there waiting. This looked like a particularly interesting case because the street grid here was “out of sync,” in the tactical flight officer’s words, with the rest of the city...' Manaugh refuses to miss an opportunity to wrap an already interesting narrative in a metaphor of his own devising, meant to enhance but in the end looking a little desperate to rearrange and do imaginative analysis when the facts alone are sufficient.

This would have been a great succession of long articles in a serious magazine of the nineties; awkwardly stretched into book form and repeatedly forced into the cracks of a fuzzy thesis, it's a bit infuriating. Must be 'the architectural geography of linear thinking' or something. Hmpf.

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 5 out of 5]

It calls Die Hard an architectural movie and somehow proves it.

[Book Concierge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manaugh looks at architecture and the central role it plays in the crime of burglary.

The book begins and ends with the 19th-century New York superburglar George Leonidas Leslie, who used his training as an architect to figure out new and unexpected ways to gain entry to building.

There were parts of this book that I found completely fascinating, and it made me look at our own efforts at home security differently. However, Manaugh has a tendency towards repetition. He’s very fond of lists: for example, “burglar, thief, robber, bandit, gang member, miscreant, delinquent” etc. This seemed a little like padding to me.

My own background as a former Probation/Parole Officer kept me reading, however. My interest was further piqued when I came across a reference to a particular criminologist … a man to whom I was once engaged! (We never married, but have remained friends for 40 years.) Well, I tell you I read much more closely after that name popped out at me.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the start of the year I published my 2021 book awards in my bookish newsletter (have you signed up yet?). I delighted in making up the categories. If I do awards for 2022, A Burglar’s Guide to the City might win Missed It By That Much (though my actual awards I tried to keep positive). Geoff Manaugh’s promise of a foray into the ways burglars exploit, undermine, or otherwise abuse architecture for nefarious ends sputters out into an unimpressive reflection on how different buildings are different, and some people are bad and do bad things.

Let’s start with what this book could have and should have been. This book should have looked at the intersection of crime and architecture—and to some extent it does, more on that later—and, crucially, sought to demonstrate cause and effect through case studies. I want you to explain to me how burglars who target residential homes in the suburbs are different from burglars who target bodegas in the inner city or warehouses at the harbour. How does the layout of a building, its materials, and its location inform the way a heist is done? Give me the greats from history, and explain how the heists benefited from—or were stymied by—the architecture of their target.

The book is at its best when Manaugh does exactly that. The sections with some historical anecdotes, the parts where he explains how burglars benefit from easy access to drywall knives, those are all cool. But for a book that is just short of three hundred pages, I took way too long to read this, and it is entirely because most of the book is boring.

Despite pretending that this book is about burglars, too much of Manaugh’s information comes instead from law enforcement. The bulk of his research seems to have happened via interviews with police officers, federal agents, or retired versions thereof—including ridealongs and other activities that I am sure were super fun for him, but did I really need him to talk about getting to see the houses from The Brady Bunch or The Jeffersons during a helicopter ride? Why would I care that so many people in Los Angeles have Oakland Raiders logos tiled at the bottom of their pool? Back to the burglary, Geoff.

But seriously, my general ACAB leanings these days, while not making me totally uninterested in stories of catching criminals, made me feel less interested in learning about burglary from law enforcement’s point of view. As Manaugh points out towards the end of the book, law enforcement only knows the tactics of the burglars it caught.

Such an excellent premise, such an incredible misuse of it resulting in a disappointing book.

Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

the burglar is a three-dimensional actor amid the two-dimensional surfaces and objects of the city. this means operating with a fundamentally different spatial sense of how architecture should work, and how one room could be connected to another. it means seeing how a building can be stented: engineering short-circuits where mere civilians, altogether less aggressive users of the city, would never expect to find them. burglary is topology pursued by other means: a new science of the city, proceeding by way of shortcuts, splices, and wormholes.

in his wholly engaging foray into urban spatial crimes, a burglar's guide to the city, bldgblog author geoff manaugh offers a close-up look into the often unseen connection between architecture and burglary. covering a wide range of subjects related to burglary, including (in)famous crimes, getaways, risk factors, evasion techniques, architectural design, security, historical precedents, legal definitions, and tools of the trade, manaugh captures the mystery, intrigue, and science of his topic quite well. with obvious enthusiasm and curiosity, manaugh's research took him to both ends of the burglary spectrum (from federal law enforcement to reformed criminals) in his quest to discover and understand the relationship between architecture, spatial design, and burglary. enticing and often absorbing, a burglar's guide to the city holds a magnifying lens above the urban milieu, revealing an entire world of architectural vulnerability, spatial puzzles, and negligent design overlooked by most (law-abiding) city-dwellers; a veritable second city oblivious to most, yet offering treasures (both literal and metaphorical) to those observant enough to know what they're looking at (or for).

heists obsess people because of what they reveal about architecture's peculiar power: the design of new ways of moving through the world. every heist is thus just a counterdesign—a response to the original architect—and something of a transformative moment in a burglar's relationship to the built environment. it is the moment at which the burglar has gone from a passive consumer of architecture to an active participant in its design.

[thefourthvine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is primarily a guidebook to more interesting books (most of which seem to have been the inspiration for major motion pictures), padded out with less-gripping firsthand research and a great deal of repetitive prose. It was still an acceptable read, but I wish it had been the book it promised to be.

Like. Am I interested in the tale of the architect who took mid-1800s New York by the throat and shook it until all its money fell out? I cannot overstate how much I am, and also in his co-conspirator, a lady of easy morals who owned a lot of warehouses and was happy to make some cold hard cash. Am I interested in how a cat burglar looks at a building? Again, very much yes. But am I interested in police surveillance and entrapment techniques? Not nearly as much. And am I interested in him discussing, yet again, various possible things he never gets around to actually analyzing in detail? No, not at all. But those last two things are two-thirds of the book; it’s just that the other third is so great it kind of makes up for them.

Also, a lot of things seemed to be included in the book thanks to the “I did the research, so I have to include it” rationale. He has a lengthy interlude with lockpickers and then concludes they have nothing to do with burglary. Okay, I believe that. Why did they get a chapter plus mentions elsewhere, then? They’re not related to the subject of the book!

The book is also hampered by two of the major issues with writing about burglary ever: 1. Most burglars aren’t interesting — they’re mostly desperate people doing crimes without thinking much. 2. The burglars whose techniques we know are the ones who got caught, and so not the most interesting ones. (Though he does have one source for the book who claims to be a burglar who didn’t get caught, but rather got out of the profession because of what sounds like a midlife crisis. That was interesting.)

I don’t know. This book gave me a LIST of other books I wanted to read, including the one about the gaslamp-era New York City burglar, but it didn’t give me enough of what I was actually looking for: the influence of architecture on crime.

[Laura Verburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a big departure from what I usually read, but taking a chance on something different paid off. It was fascinating to go along with the author as he worked his way through research of all kinds, exploring many different facets of burglary, or anything remotely related to burglary. That was perhaps the most interesting part--the author's tendency to twist and turn through subtopics, going off on what seemed to be tangents, only to have them tie back in to the main themes, or be explored as a whole new main theme of their own. The scope of information is vast, covering everything from the official definition of burglary, to locksport (essentially picking locks as a hobby), to famous heists and how they were performed, to panic rooms, to various films and how they can be viewed as examples of manipulating "the built environment," which is a key skill of most burglars. The book is dense, but quite interesting, and nearly always entertaining. Many of the subtopics, or even pieces of information just briefly referenced, could be fascinating books all of their own, so I admire the author's ability to pick and choose which bits to include here. Overall, a very enjoyable and informative read!

[Erik · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps a more fitting title for Geoff Manaugh's journalistic account of the craft of burglary would be "A Police Apologists Account of the Rise of the Surveillance State." Focusing more on the cops who dedicate much of their lives, and far too much of their psyches, to catching burglars, robbers, and petty thieves, Manaugh's book at times feels like nothing short of a police memoir.

Admittedly, Manaugh's explicit thesis is an interesting one: the existence of burglary complicates how we conceive of architecture and the built environment because burglars don't encounter the phenomenon of architecture in the same way as the normal users of buildings do. But his thesis is ultimately not specifically well-defended for the most part because he spends so much time justifying his thesis by talking to cops who are obviously biased against certain of these acts.

Further, Manaugh, though he wishes to see himself as attempting to approach burglary from a neutral position, instead makes massive assumptions about crime and criminals that one would believe a reader familiar with Critical Theory wouldn't make.

Skip this book and read some really theory on crime. You won't miss much.

[Misha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting content but Manaugh Circumlocutiously repeats everything he says. This leads to some great turns of phrase in all the variations on the theme of not using architecture as intended but by the end of the book it's mostly just tedious.

[First Second Books]

It appears that as well as there being a lock-picking group in Calista's neighborhood, there's one in Brooklyn, too! More exploration is needed here.

This was a fascinating book about architecture and how people think about space and buildings and construction and burglary! Highly recommended.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 3 out of 5]

More about burglary and less about architecture than I would have liked. Entertaining, and well researched, but a tad repetitive.

[S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

My house was burglarised once, and I can't dismiss the shock and trauma to feel utterly unsafe, helpless and fragile in a chaotic reality (which by then seemed to be a nonchalant way of putting things into perspective - All I know is that I went Kaput). But the way I've been robbed, had nothing to do with the genius/(roofman)/tunnel jobs ways I'd discover later on in this book. They simply hopped on the fence and forced the house's door open with huge rocks, and maybe some equipment unsuccessfully,but managed to find another way in through one window. If you still think that putting on steel frames on your windows would help, please think twice.
Aaaaanyway.....
So when I started this book, I couldn't get rid of the assumption, that here lies a guide enlisting things to avoid while "architecting",... However I ended up drooling over all the exciting stories about famous burglars in the human history (not literally). I confess that it was refreshing, and that I was hopelessly trying to save someone time to carry on reading... It has all the ingredients for a heist movie: LAPD units, FBI agents, Police Officers, and the least expected scenarios.
I appreciated how it was subtly linking spatial features (urban or architectural wise) to blind spots that can eventually serve a burglar's attempt. If there's another title to be given to this book, would be to borrow" La dimension cachée" (Hidden dimension) from E.T Hall.

"The burglar is just a person—no, a genius!—who happens to use his or her talents in a morally troubling way. But we shouldn’t hold illegality against them—indeed, we should hold that for them, I thought I might argue, because we would never have discovered the true potential of the built environment had it not been for someone willing to break the rules. In fact, we should celebrate the burglar, this new archetype, this devil in the details of the built environment, a mythic figure who shows us what architecture, all along, could really be and, more important, how we should have been using it all along."

[Rick Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s entertaining and pretty interesting. I think the author does seem a bit too impressed by the fact that like you can cut a hole in a wall. And maybe that’s my construction experience souring me on thinking that the things around us are some sort of magical barrier or property.

It’s an interesting way to view architecture and construction. There’s some interesting digressions into the gray areas around breaking an entering. Genuinely thought that the legal discussion was interesting.

Not a life-changing book but definitely a quick interesting read

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

The idea behind this was interesting but it read a bit dryly for me. The short of it is that Burglars use architecture opposite the way it is intended, and challenge the way people live. Overall it had a few moments of 'that's neat' but otherwise I had trouble staying focused on it (I listened to the audio book).

[Karen Chung · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. It will really help you see and think outside of the box of urban architecture - and may even give you ideas on how to use an indirect rather than rule-following approach to problem solving.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really loved the earlier chapters! They do a very good job of making architecture "real"; i.e. showing the various ways that the architecture of our streets and buildings effects our lives, and how someone with awareness of this can exploit it to their own benefit. However, outside of the first few chapters, it tends to lose some steam.

[LAPL Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I cross the street at the crosswalk. I use the entrance and exit doors as marked, even when they take me a long way around. Sometimes, I wait forlornly on deserted street corners for the sign to indicate that it is finally all right to “WALK”. So, like Geoff Manaugh, author of A burglar's guide to the city, I was thrilled to learn that there were other ways to understand and move through urban spaces. This is not an instruction manual or safety guide. It doesn’t teach you to be a burglar. Instead the book explores the ways that burglars, thieves, and assorted miscreants see and take advantage of urban architectural space. After all, nobody knows more about a building than the person who is going to dress up in a black catsuit, jump off a second-story balcony next store, sneak across the roof, and rappel down the wall, just to get inside when no one is there. Most of us would just use the front door, and knock or ring the bell. But the burglars that Manaugh writes about don’t let what most of us do stop them from tunneling through the floor. Manaugh calls them, “idiot masters of the built environment” and “drunk Jedis of architectural space.”

But this book is not about revering criminals. Manaugh writes candidly about the violation people feel after their homes are broken into, so it is definitely not about glory. It is an exciting survey of the history of cops and robbers, burglary and capers (some smart ones and other downright ridiculous capers), and how criminals are determined to get inside a building, other than at the legitimate time and manner. In fact, A burglar's guide to the city reads a little like a caper film (in book format): a smart, frothy summer blockbuster. So if you find yourself missing the television show Leverage, or yearning for another Ocean’s Eleven film, or cheering along with the adventures of Marcus Yallow in Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, give A burglar's guide to the city a try.

Reviewed by Andrea Borchert, Librarian, Science, Technology & Patents Department

[Max Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review and highlights at https://books.max-nova.com/burglars-guide

"A Burglar's Guide to the City" plays with the subversive idea that "burglars are idiot masters of the built environment, drunk Jedis of architectural space." Exploring the exotic ways that criminals exploit architectural weaknesses, Manaugh walks us through some of the most famous heists in history and how creative uses of the built environment played a role in their success. He latches on to the idea that burglary is a uniquely "spatial" crime and loving details the evolution of the cat-and-mouse game between those trying to break into buildings and those trying to keep them out.

Manaugh devotes considerable time to Los Angeles, explaining how its highways have helped to shape the city's emergence as one of the major bank robbery capitals of the world. He flies around with the LAPD helicopter surveillance team to understand their perspective on how urban design affects getaway strategies. I loved the bit about the forgotten subterranean creeks used as tunneling routes. I was also surprised to learn that many banks in LA decide to skimp on security, relying on the government's obligation to investigate bank crime... worth digging into deeper.

I endured some detours into now-obsolete lock-picking and convoluted legal definitions of burglary, but my favorite parts of this book were the descriptions of the notorious burglaries. The exuberant, nearly giddy tone of the book made it a fun read, but Manuagh occasionally errs on the side of being too cute and clever. He strays pretty far out on the shaky limb of architectural philosophizing, but I mostly forgive him for these transgressions because of the fascinating subject matter of this delightful book.