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

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

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

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

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town

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

Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns

Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies Our Transportation System

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

Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource

The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet

The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream

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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

More urban planning books...

Lists

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1 by Henri Lefebvre

Books in Architecture School (nonfiction)

32 books — 18 voters

The Peoples of Philadelphia by Allen F. Davis

Philadelphia Books

17 books — 5 voters

Urban Studies & Planning

42 books — 1 voter

Inventing Future Cities by Michael Batty

Planning Support Methods by Richard E Klosterman

Recent Books on Urban Futures

5 books — 1 voter

Public Transportation and Why It Is Awesome

123 books — 10 voters

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler

Urban/Urban Landscape (nonfiction)

94 books — 15 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”

“ Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. ”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

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“ Catholics, Louis Wirth found out first-hand, did not like what he had to say and were willing to use their political clout to prevent him from saying it in not only religious institutions but public institutions where they wielded local political power. Like Wilhelm Reich, another German Jewish Marxist immigrant, Wirth saw the Catholic Church in America in a different light from the way his WASP contemporaries did. As a result of growing up in an essentially Protestant country, they had long see Catholics, Louis Wirth found out first-hand, did not like what he had to say and were willing to use their political clout to prevent him from saying it in not only religious institutions but public institutions where they wielded local political power. Like Wilhelm Reich, another German Jewish Marxist immigrant, Wirth saw the Catholic Church in America in a different light from the way his WASP contemporaries did. As a result of growing up in an essentially Protestant country, they had long seen the Catholic Church, because of what had happened in England, as malign but essentially marginalized. Wirth’s view was much closer to Reich’s sense that the Catholic Church was the main competitor to Marxism for the mind of modern man, primarily because both systems were more all-encompassing than the essentially/laissez-faire English ideology. Given his Marxist politics, his repudiation of traditional religious belief, and his assimilationist attitude toward ethnicity, it is not surprising that Wirth would be drawn to the internationalist cause during the days preceding World War II. Like his New York counterpart, Robert Moses, Wirth saw ethnicity as retrograde and something which was to be replaced by faith in things rational and enlightened. The irony, of course, is that in espousing the Enlightenment, Wirth was also espousing what one might call internationalist ethnocentrism, which is to say, the views of the dominant ethnic group in the United States at that time, the WASP East Coast establishment, as defined by the interests of the Rockefeller family, which had created the University of Chicago, Wirth’s employer, and the modern social sciences along with it. By identifying with the cause of the Rockefeller family and the ethnic interests they represented, Wirth became a paradigm of the assimilation he would impose on his fellow Americans. This meant not repudiating ethnicity in the interest of class — although that’s what Wirth claimed he did — but rather exchanging one ethnic identification for another. Wirth was a paradigmatic example of what Digby Baltzell urged in his 1963 book The Protestant Establishment, the Jew who rose to a position of acceptance in the WASP ruling class by internalizing their cause and using the latest scientific advances (in the social sciences) to do their bidding. By doing what he did, Wirth endowed ethnicity with something less than ultimate value. ...more ”
― E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

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