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"

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

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

Borderlines: A History of Europe, Told from the Edges

52 Ways to Walk: The Surprising Science of Walking for Wellness and Joy, One Week at a Time

Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City

The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990

The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset

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

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

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

A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall

The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region

Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers

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

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

Bibliography for Walkable City

52 books — 4 voters

The Peoples of Philadelphia by Allen F. Davis

Philadelphia Books

17 books — 5 voters

The Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio

A Pattern Language by Christopher W. Alexander

The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius

A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia McAlester

Best Traditional Architecture (nonfiction)

156 books — 55 voters

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Urban Studies & Planning

68 books — 4 voters

Detroit, I Do Mind Dying by Dan Georgakas

Ninety Percent of Everything by Rose George

The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones

Urban Planning Histories (nonfiction)

120 books — 9 voters

The Quest for College Heights by Sherman Lewis

Inventing Future Cities by Michael Batty

Recent Books on Urban Futures

6 books — 2 voters

Related Genres

Architecture
Geography
Cities
Urban Planning
Urban Design

Urban Policy
House Building
Rural Planning
Regional Planning

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Great New Books to Read for Hispanic Heritage Month

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Quotes Tagged “Urban Planning”

“ 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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“ [...] most American cities have been designed or redesigned principally around the assumption of universal automotive use, resulting in obligatory car ownership, typically one per adult—starting at age sixteen. In these cities, and in most of our nation, the car is no longer an instrument of freedom, but rather a bulky, expensive, and dangerous prosthetic device, a prerequisite to viable citizenship. ”
― Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

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