“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” — Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Start Here

• The Story of Cities
  Multiple writers, The Guardian [2016]

Somewhat serendipitously, there is a fantastic 50-part series running over at The Guardian right now that’s “charting the history of the planet’s urbanization.” Only 16 stories have been published, but highlights so far include the lost majesty of Benin City and the birth of the science of urban planning in Barcelona. It’s a fantastic overview of how each great city has given the world some kind of innovative idea.

Books

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
  Jane Jacobs [1961]

This is quite possibly the most influential book about urban planning. Jacobs argues against then-fashionable modernist principles, and in favor of chaos, complexity, and mixed-use neighborhoods. It’s one (convincing) side of a debate that’s been raging ever since, and a good primer on why many cities look the way they do.

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
  Robert Caro [1975]

Robert Moses, who for half a century was the unelected emperor and city planner of New York City, is the target of this Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Moses masterfully used political influence to shape American urban design and policy for decades, and Caro expertly details just how much cities are shaped by the figures who build authority over them.

• London: The Biography
  Peter Ackroyd [2001]

There are many great cities of the world, and there are many great city biographies, but this is one of the best. Peter Ackroyd covers 2,000 years in nearly half as many pages, showing how a small Roman fishing and trading village grew to become, arguably, the world’s capital city. He also covers how cities change according to outside influences, and how the outside world can change in response to a city.

Shorter Reads

Just in case you don’t want to read entire books—it is 2016, after all — we’ve got a bunch of shorter links for you to check out, broken down by topic. Again, they’re not comprehensive but serve well as an introduction.

LIFE & DEATH & EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

• I’m From Philly. 30 Years Later, I’m Still Trying to Make Sense of the MOVE Bombing
  Gene Demby, NPR [10-minute read]
• How One California City Began Bringing Its Murder Rate Down — Without Cops
  Heather Tirado Gilligan, The Nation [7-minute read]
• Death by Gentrification: The Killing That Shamed San Francisco
  Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian [15-minute read]
• A Call for Help: What the Kitty Genovese Story Really Means
  Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker [7-minute read]
• Los Angeles Isn’t London, and Other Things That Are Wrong With California
  Dave Munson, Munson’s City [5-minute read]
• The American Lawn Needs to Die
  Eric Nicholson, Dallas Observer [6-minute read]
• London’s Great Exodus
  Michael Goldfarb, The New York Times [3-minute read]
• Spite Houses: 12 Homes Created With Anger and Angst
  Patrick Sisson, Curbed [3-minute read] [via @jasmineeec]
• When I Grow Up: The theme-park chain where children pretend to be adult
  Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker [10-minute read] [via @jasmineeec]
• Outkast, Contextually
  Jason Parham, Gawker [5-minute read] [via @jasmineeec]
• The New Roma Ghettos
  Aaron Lake Smith, Vice [10-minute read] [via @jasmineeec]

ARCHITECTURE

• The New New World
  Anne Applebaum, Slate [3-minute read]
• The Father of the American Shopping Mall Hated What He Created
  Anne Quito, Quartz [5-minute read]
• Inside Almere: The Dutch City That’s Pioneering Alternative Housing
  Thomas Feary, The Guardian [4-minute read]

INFRASTRUCTURE & PLANNING

• The Racist Housing Policies That Built Ferguson
  Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic [3-minute read]
• Why the People in Charge of Transit Systems Should Be Required to Actually Ride Transit
  Eric Jaffe, CityLab [3-minute read]
• Visions of a Development Rising From the Sea
  Julie Satow, The New York Times [4-minute read]
• The Car Century Was a Mistake. It’s Time to Move On
  J. H. Crawford, The Washington Post [3-minute read]
• Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse
  Adam Mann, Wired [5-minute read]
• The Suburb That Tried to Kill the Car
  T. R. Goldman, Politico [4-minute read]
• Debunking the Cul-de-Sac
  Emily Badger, CityLab [5-minute read]

Maybe you’d prefer to ingest your cities-related content in the form of video or audio?

Watch and Listen

• “Soul City,” 99% Invisible [34-minute listen]

There are few podcasts as wonderful as 99% Invisible, hosted by Roman Mars. Its beat is “design,” but often that means the design of the places we live. The most recent episode is a perfect example — about an attempt by a civil rights leader in the 1960s to build a new home for African-Americans wanting to escape their existing deprived communities—but there are many more episodes just as illuminating to check out from the archives.

(Personal favorites include: one about an unfinished art school in Havana, another about a skyscraper in NYC that nearly fell over, and an episode about how a city can be built in such a way to keep poor and rich people apart without either realizing it.)

• Jerry Building, BBC [36-minute watch]

For my money, since the mid-90s the most consistently excellent documentaries about architecture have come from writer and critic Jonathan Meades for the BBC. Meades is an extremely intelligent and witty analyst of architectural theory, though his on-screen persona — he speaks like a newsreader from a 1930s newsreel—might be alienating to some.

“Jerry Building” was the first Meades’s piece I saw. It examines how architecture (and architects) can be used as tools of cultural control and repression by dictatorships. Meades shines just as much when looking at the same topic in Soviet Russia, or investigating gentrification and regeneration, retrofuturism, or the legacy of the Victorians.

• Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation [94-minute watch]

One of the better recent documentaries about architecture as a passion and art form, Sagrada is a beautifully shot portrait of both Barcelona’s most famous building and the team of religiously inspired artisans who have been trying to complete Gaudi’s life’s work.

• The Pruitt-Igoe Myth [83-minute watch]

The Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis was built during a time when people felt modern buildings could fix social ills; its failure, and subsequent demolition, has been held up as evidence that large-scale social housing can never work. This documentary attempts to fight that belief.

• Waste Land [100-minute watch]

The waste of the world has to go somewhere, and in many cities — like Rio de Janeiro — there is a poor underclass which has to scavenge that waste for survival. Artist Vik Muniz’s portrait of them, and their journey from outsiders to outsider artists, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2010.

This is, without question, an incomplete list. Let us know by replying below what we’ve missed!