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Urban Acupuncture
Jaime Lerner
Island Press, 2016
During his three terms as mayor of Curitiba, Brazil in the 1970s and ‘80s, architect and urbanist Jaime Lerner transformed his city into a global model of the sustainable and livable community. From the pioneering Bus Rapid Transit system to parks designed to catch runoff and reduce flooding, and the creation of pedestrian-only zones, Lerner has been the driving force behind a host of innovative urban projects. In more than forty years of work in cities around the globe, Lerner has found that changes to a community don’t need to be large-scale and expensive to have a transformative impact—in fact, one block, park, or a single person can have an outsized effect on life in the surrounding city.

In Urban Acupuncture, Lerner celebrates these “pinpricks” of urbanism—projects, people, and initiatives from around the world that ripple through their communities to uplift city life. With meditative and descriptive prose, Lerner brings readers around the world to streets and neighborhoods where urban acupuncture has been practiced best, from the bustling La Boqueria market in Barcelona to the revitalization of the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul, South Korea. Through this journey, Lerner invites us to re-examine the true building blocks of vibrant communities—the tree-lined avenues, night vendors, and songs and traditions that connect us to our cities and to one another.

Urban Acupuncture is the first of Jaime Lerner’s visionary work to be published in English. It is a love letter to the elements that make a street hum with life or a neighborhood feel like home, penned by one of the world’s most successful advocates for sustainable and livable urbanism.
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Urban Design
Alex Krieger
University of Minnesota Press, 2009

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Urban Design in Western Europe
Regime and Architecture, 900-1900
Wolfgang Braunfels
University of Chicago Press, 1990
What makes a city endure and prosper? In this masterful survey of a thousand years of urban architecture, Wolfgang Braunfels identified certain themes common to cities as different as Siena and London, Munich and Venice. Most important is an architecture that expresses the city's personality and most particularly its political personality. Braunfels describes and classifies scores of cities—cathedral cities, city-state, maritime cities, imperial cities—and examines the links between their political and architectural histories. Lavishly illustrated with city plans, bird's-eye views, early renderings, and modern photographs, this book will delight and instruct architects, urban planners, historians, and travelers.
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Urban Development
The Logic Of Making Plans
Lewis Hopkins
Island Press, 2001

With increased awareness of the role of plans in shaping urban and suburban landscapes has come increased criticism of planners and the planning profession. Developers, politicians, and citizens alike blame "poor planning" for a host of community ills. But what are plans really supposed to do? How do they work? What problems can they successfully address, and what is beyond their scope? In Urban Development, leading planning scholar Lewis Hopkins tackles these thorny issues as he explains the logic of plans for urban development and justifies prescriptions about when and how to make them. He explores the concepts behind plans, some that are widely accepted but seldom examined, and others that modify conventional wisdom about the use and usefulness of plans. The book:

  • places the role of plans and planners within the complex system of urban development
  • offers examples from the history of plans and planning
  • discusses when plans should be made (and when they should not be made)
  • gives a realistic idea of what can be expected from plans
  • examines ways of gauging the success or failure of plans

The author supports his explanations with graphics, case examples, and hypothetical illustrations that enliven, clarify, and make concrete the discussions of how decisions about plans are and should be made.

Urban Development will give all those involved with planning human settlements a more thorough understanding of why and how plans are made, enabling them to make better choices about using and making plans. It is an important contribution that will be essential for students and faculty in planning theory, land use planning, and planning project courses.

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Urban Ecological Design
A Process for Regenerative Places
Danilo Palazzo and Frederick Steiner
Island Press, 2011
This trailblazing book outlines an interdisciplinary "process model" for urban design that has been developed and tested over time. Its goal is not to explain how to design a specific city precinct or public space, but to describe useful steps to approach the transformation of urban spaces. Urban Ecological Design illustrates the different stages in which the process is organized, using theories, techniques, images, and case studies. In essence, it presents a "how-to" method to transform the urban landscape that is thoroughly informed by theory and practice. 
 
The authors note that urban design is viewed as an interface between different disciplines. They describe the field as "peacefully overrun, invaded, and occupied" by city planners, architects, engineers, and landscape architects (with developers and politicians frequently joining in). They suggest that environmental concerns demand the consideration of ecology and sustainability issues in urban design. It is, after all, the urban designer who helps to orchestrate human relationships with other living organisms in the built environment.
 
The overall objective of the book is to reinforce the role of the urban designer as an honest broker and promoter of design processes and as an active agent of social creativity in the production of the public realm.
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Urban Green
Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities
Peter Harnik
Island Press, 2010

For years American urban parks fell into decay due to disinvestment, but as cities began to rebound—and evidence of the economic, cultural, and health benefits of parks grew— investment in urban parks swelled. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently cited meeting the growing demand for parks and open space as one of the biggest challenges for urban leaders today. It is now widely agreed that the U.S. needs an ambitious and creative plan to increase urban parklands.

Urban Green explores new and innovative ways for “built out” cities to add much-needed parks. Peter Harnik first explores the question of why urban parkland is needed and then looks at ways to determine how much is possible and where park investment should go. When presenting the ideas and examples for parkland, he also recommends political practices that help create parks.

The book offers many practical solutions, from reusing the land under defunct factories to sharing schoolyards, from building trails on abandoned tracks to planting community gardens, from decking parks over highways to allowing more activities in cemeteries, from eliminating parking lots to uncovering buried streams, and more. No strategy alone is perfect, and each has its own set of realities. But collectively they suggest a path toward making modern cities more beautiful, more sociable, more fun, more ecologically sound, and more successful.

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Urban Infrastructure
Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World
Joseph Heathcott, Jonathan Soffer, and Rae Zimmerman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Urban Infrastructures creates space for an encounter between historians, humanists, and social scientists who seek new methodological approaches to the history of urban infrastructure. It draws on recent work across history, anthropology, science and technology studies, geography, resilience/sustainability, and other disciplines to explore the social effects of infrastructure. The volume rejects narrow conceptions of infrastructure history as only the history of public works, and instead expands the definition to all business enterprises and public bodies that provide the goods and services essential for the day-to-day lives of most people. Essays examine traditional artifacts such as roads, highways, and waterworks, as well as nontraditional topics like regimes of heating and cooling, the processing and distribution of food, and even the metaphysics of electromagnetic infrastructure. Contributors reveal both the material grounding of urban social relations and the social life of material infrastructure. In the end, they show that infrastructure profoundly reshapes urban life even as residents fight to reshape infrastructure to their own ends.

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Urban Land Use Planning, Fifth Edition
Philip R. Berke, David R. Godschalk, and Edward J. Kaiser, with Daniel A. Rodriguez
University of Illinois Press, 2006

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Urban Lowlands
A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning
Steven T. Moga
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Interrogates the connections between a city’s physical landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points.

In Urban Lowlands, Steven T. Moga looks closely at the Harlem Flats in New York City, Black Bottom in Nashville, Swede Hollow in Saint Paul, and the Flats in Los Angeles, to interrogate the connections between a city’s actual landscape and the poverty and social problems that are often concentrated at its literal lowest points. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective on the history of US urban development from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Moga reveals patterns of inequitable land use, economic dispossession, and social discrimination against immigrants and minorities. In attending to the landscapes of neighborhoods typically considered slums, Moga shows how physical and policy-driven containment has shaped the lives of the urban poor, while wealth and access to resources have been historically concentrated in elevated areas—truly “the heights.” Moga’s innovative framework expands our understanding of how planning and economic segregation alike have molded the American city.
 
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Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914
Brian Ladd
Harvard University Press, 1990

This unique contribution to social and urban history describes the struggle of prosperous German bourgeois leaders to bring order to their rapidly growing cities during the tumultuous age of industrial expansion in the decades before World War I. Brian Ladd sets the emerging theory and practice of city planning in the context of debates about the nature of the modern city and the possibility of improving society by regulating its physical environment. In so doing, he reveals the extent to which modern city planning is a product of the aspirations, prejudices, and frustrations of the German burghers who created it.

He sifts through the often contradictory motives underlying public health works (including waterworks, sewers, baths, and parks); plans for streets and squares, especially in new developments; working-class housing, zoning, public transit, and aesthetic concerns. He examines planning as civic boosterism and as social reform, identifying the reformers and describing their role in urban politics and society. His analysis focuses on Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Frankfurt-am-Main, but also pays considerable attention to Berlin and other cities.

This broad-gauged view of an increasingly popular subject will enlighten historians of Germany and of modern Europe, urban historians, city planners, and architectural historians.

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Urban Planning in the Nordic World
Ellen Braae
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

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Urban Regimes and Strategies
Building Europe's Central Executive District in Brussels
Alex G. Papadopoulos
University of Chicago Press, 1996
If a city based its planning decisions on the needs of an international bureaucracy rather than on the traditional needs of local residents and businesses, how would that city change? How might it look?

In Brussels, Belgium—since 1957 home to the European Union—such change is taking place. Observing the change, Alexis G. Papadopoulos explores a new geographical concept, the Central Executive District. This urban form is significantly different from the Central Business District, its conventional counterpart. Drawing on game and rational choice theories, spatial analysis, and land economics, the author analyzes how the landscape of the city's center has evolved over the last three decades under the influence of successive coalitions of local and foreign elites. He describes how foreign diplomats, international corporate executives, and real-estate developers cooperate with one another to carry out major urban projects in the face of resistance from local neighborhood groups, conservationists, and political factions.

This study makes a substantial contribution to geography and urban studies both for its implications about the future of world cities like New York, London, and Paris and for its original application of the notion of cooperative regimes.
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Urban Rivers
Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America
Stéphane Castonguay
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012

Urban Rivers examines urban interventions on rivers through politics, economics, sanitation systems, technology, and societies; how rivers affected urbanization spatially, in infrastructure, territorial disputes, and in floodplains, and via their changing ecologies. Providing case studies from Vienna to Manitoba, the chapters assemble geographers and historians in a comparative survey of how cities and rivers interacted from the seventeenth century to the present.

Rising cities and industries were great agents of social and ecological changes, particularly during the nineteenth century, when mass populations and their effluents were introduced to river environments. Accumulated pollution and disease mandated the transfer of wastes away from population centers. In many cases, potable water for cities now had to be drawn from distant sites. These developments required significant infrastructural improvements, creating social conflicts over land jurisdiction and affecting the lives and livelihood of nonurban populations.  The effective reach of cities extended and urban space was remade. By the mid-twentieth century, new technologies and specialists emerged to combat the effects of industrialization. Gradually, the health of urban rivers improved.

From protoindustrial fisheries, mills, and transportation networks, through industrial hydroelectric plants and sewage systems, to postindustrial reclamation and recreational use, Urban Rivers documents how Western societies dealt with the needs of mass populations while maintaining the viability of their natural resources.  The lessons drawn from this study will be particularly relevant to today's emerging urban economies situated along rivers and waterways.

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Urban Sprawl and Public Health
Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities
Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson
Island Press, 2004

In Urban Sprawl and Public Health, Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank, and Richard Jackson, three of the nation's leading public health and urban planning experts explore an intriguing question: How does the physical environment in which we live affect our health? For decades, growth and development in our communities has been of the low-density, automobile-dependent type known as sprawl. The authors examine the direct and indirect impacts of sprawl on human health and well-being, and discuss the prospects for improving public health through alternative approaches to design, land use, and transportation.

Urban Sprawl and Public Health offers a comprehensive look at the interface of urban planning, architecture, transportation, community design, and public health. It summarizes the evidence linking adverse health outcomes with sprawling development, and outlines the complex challenges of developing policy that promotes and protects public health. Anyone concerned with issues of public health, urban planning, transportation, architecture, or the environment will want to read Urban Sprawl and Public Health.

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Urban Sustainability
A Global Perspective
Igor Vojnovic
Michigan State University Press, 2012

More than half the world’s population currently lives in urban areas, and virtually all of the world’s population growth over the next three decades is expected to be in cities. What impact will this growth have on the environment? What can we do now to pave the way for resource longevity? Sustainability has received considerable attention in recent years, though conceptions of the term remain vague. Using a wide array of cities around the globe as case studies, this timely book explores the varying nature of global urban-environmental stresses and the complexities involved in defining sustainability policies. Working with six core themes, the editor examines the past, present, and future of urban sustainability within local, national, and global contexts.

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Urban Traditions and Historic Environments in Sindh
A Fading Legacy of Shikarpoor, Historic City
Anila Naeem
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Shikarpoor Historic City, in Sindh, Pakistan, has a rich historical heritage: as a central point on caravan trade routes, it served as the gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia. In recognition of that history, in 1998 the government of Sindh named it a protected heritage site-but that status hasn't prevented the ongoing destruction of the city's historic fabric. This book tells the story of Shikarpoor and presents as complete a picture of its threatened historical fabric as possible, through copious maps and images past and present.
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Urban Transformation
Understanding City Form and Design
Peter Bosselmann
Island Press, 2008
How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photos and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew.
 
Bosselmann organizes the book around seven “activities”: comparing, observing, transforming, measuring, defining, modeling, and interpreting.  He introduces readers to his way of seeing by comparing satellite-produced “maps” of the world’s twenty largest cities. With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias.
 
He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. We learn how to measure quality-of-life parameters that are often considered immeasurable, including “vitality,” “livability,” and “belonging.” Utilizing the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Modeling, he reveals, is not so much about creating models as it is about bringing others into public, democratic discussions. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later.
 
Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work.” His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer inventive new solutions to familiar urban problems.
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Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change
Peter Calthorpe
Island Press, 2010
“Cities are green” is becoming a common refrain.  But Calthorpe argues that a more comprehensive understanding of urbanism at the regional scale provides a better platform to address climate change.  In this groundbreaking new work, he shows how such regionally scaled urbanism can be combined with green technology to achieve not only needed reductions in carbon emissions but other critical economies and lifestyle benefits.  Rather than just providing another checklist of new energy sources or one dimensional land use alternatives, he combines them into comprehensive national growth scenarios for 2050 and documents their potential impacts.  In so doing he powerfully demonstrates that it will take an integrated approach of land use transformation, policy changes, and innovative technology to transition to a low carbon economy. 
 
To accomplish this Calthorpe synthesizes thirty years of experience, starting with his ground breaking work in sustainable community design in the 1980s following through to his current leadership in transit-oriented design, regional planning, and land use policy. Peter Calthorpe shows us what is possible using real world examples of innovative design strategies and forward-thinking policies that are already changing the way we live.
 
This provocative and engaging work emerges from Calthorpe’s belief that, just as the last fifty years produced massive changes in our culture, economy and environment, the next fifty will generate changes of an even more profound nature. The book, enhanced by its superb four-color graphics, is a call to action and a road map for moving forward.
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Urbanism Without Effort
Reconnecting with First Principles of the City
Charles R. Wolfe
Island Press, 2018
How do you create inviting and authentic urban environments where people feel at home? Countless community engagement workshops, studies by consulting firms, and downtown revitalization campaigns have attempted to answer this age-old question. In Urbanism Without Effort, Chuck Wolfe argues that “unplanned” places can often teach us more about great placemaking than planned ones.
 
From impromptu movie nights in a Seattle alley to the adapted reuse of Diocletian’s Palace in Split, Croatia, Wolfe searches for the “first principles” of what makes humans feel happy and safe amid the hustle and bustle of urban life. He highlights the common elements of cities around the world that spontaneously bring people together: being inherently walkable, factors that contribute to safety at night, the importance of intersections and corners, and more. In this age of skyrocketing metropolitan growth, he argues, looking to the past might be our best approach to creating the urban future we dream about.
 
A whirlwind global tour, Urbanism Without Effort offers readers inspiration, historical context, and a better understanding of how an inviting urban environment is created.
 
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