I’m just com­ing back from a book club (adult con­ver­sa­tion? But… but… I’m a par­ent… Real­ly?). The top­ic was Jane Jacob’s 1961 clas­sic, The Death and Life of Great Amer­i­can Cities. The six of us gath­ered in a Collingswood, N.J., cof­fee shop were all city design geeks and I could bare­ly keep up with the ideas and books that had influ­enced every­one. Here is a very incom­plete list:

• Strong­towns blog and pod­cast. Charles Marohn
• Geog­ra­phy of Nowhere. James Howard Kun­stler’s 1993 book on sub­ur­ban sprawl, which I loved at the time.
• The Big Sort. Bill Bish­op, 2008.
• The Great Good Place. Ray Old­en­burg. Pop­u­lar­ized the “third places” con­cept of places peo­ple can gath­er togeth­er out­side of home and work (as exam­ple: the cof­fee shop in which we met, Groove­ground, did­n’t seem to mind six peo­ple nat­ter­ing on about urban­ism until clos­ing time).
• Amy Cud­dy’s Ted Talk, “Your body lan­guage shapes who you are” (in our con­text, we were sug­gest­ing a cor­re­la­tion between road rage and the phys­i­cal pos­es of driving)
• The End of the Sub­urbs.  Leigh Gal­lagher, 2014
• Fight­ing Traf­fic. Peter D. Norton
• Wrestling with Moses. Antho­ny Flint’s 2009 book that goes behind the scenes of Jane Jacob’s plan­ning bat­tles with the near-mythic high­way builder Robert Moses, a sub­text that under­lies Death and Life but is most­ly just hint­ed at.
• Antifrag­ile: Things That Gain with Dis­or­der. Nas­sim Nicholas Taleb, 212.
• Jacobin Mag­a­zine has pub­lished pieces about how Jane Jacob’s insights and lan­guage have been coopt­ed by mar­ket forces. See “Lib­er­al­ism and Gen­tri­fi­ca­tion” and “The Peo­ple’s Play­ground.”
• I kept think­ing about a big issue Jacobs kepts skirt­ing about: race.  It’s real­ly impos­si­ble for me to look at urban pat­terns with­out think­ing about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Repa­ra­tions.” Decades of redlin­ing and the racial com­po­nents of who gets mort­gages is a big fac­tor in our social geog­ra­phy (see also TNC’s Atlantic col­league Alex­is C. Madri­gal’s “The Racist Hous­ing Pol­i­cy That Made Your Neigh­bor­hood” and pon­der why charm­ing Collingswood is 82 per­cent white while adjoin­ing Cam­den is only 18 percent).
• Robert Moses: The Mas­ter Builder of New York. Pierre Christin and Olivi­er Balez. A graph­ic nov­el of Robert Moses (no way!). “How New York Became New York” is an review of the novel.

Update: And also, from Genevieve’s list:

• Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dou­glas Adams, for its absur­dist humor around the bureau­cra­cies of planning
• Green Metrop­o­lis. David Owen,
• “What’s Up With That: Build­ing Big­ger Roads Actu­al­ly Makes Traf­fic Worse,” an arti­cle by Adam Mann in Wired on the phe­nom­e­non of induced demand.
• Vision Zero Initiative
• The Pine Bar­rens. John McPhee, the clas­sic which I brought up.
• The Pow­er Bro­ker. Robert Caro.
• The Ecol­o­gy of Com­merce. Paul Hawken
• Orga­niz­ing in the South Bronx. Jim Rooney
• Re: race: Dal­ton Con­ley’s Being Black, Liv­ing in the Red and When Work Dis­ap­pears by William Julius Wilson.
• Re: bicy­cles: Urban Bik­ers’ Tricks & Tips. Dave Glowacz

Excuse me for the next six months while I read. 🙂