Top 5 Urban Planning Books (metro, Baltimore, suburban, highway)

[mel80202]

1) "The Geography of Nowhere" -- Jame Howard Kunstler
2) "City Boy: Urban Planning, Municipal Politics, and Guerrilla Warfare" -- Mike Tedesco (I may need to bump Kunstler but I'll give it a another read and decide for sure)
3) "The Rise of the Creative Class" -- Richard Florida (a must read for all economic development professionals)
4) "Great Streets" Allan Jacobs
5) "The High Cost of Free Parking" -- Shoup (I forgot his first name)

For alll you urban thinkers out there, I need something new to read! Give me some ideas!

[lolagranola]

I haven't read it yet, but want to: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart :: Bill Bishop

[BlueWillowPlate]

The Death and Life of American Cities by Jane Jacobs (ahead of its time, this book predicted the problems of sprawl)

A Better Place to Live by Philip Langdon (explanation of new urbanism and how it differs from traditional suburban design)

The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (novel about small town life and its decline)

Century of the City by Peirce, Johnson and Peters (identifies problems with the cities of our planet, and offers strategies for fixing them)

A Better Way to Zone: Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities by Donald Elliot. Lessons learned from the past.

Small is Beautiful
I am adding this one; so many people think economics is boring, and while some of it does go over my head, other principles are so simple and so important.

[brubaker]

Great suggestions, I didn't really get into Creative Class but to each their own.

[JefferyT]

Im not so much into urban planning but urban history.

Some faves:

Streetcar Cities and the Urban Wilderness, by Sam Bass Warner (first one is about Boston)

Chicago, Growth of a Metropolis, by Myer & Wade (Chicago)

The Orgins of the Urban Crisis, by TJ Sugrue (Detroit)

City of Quartz, by Mike Davis & The Architecture of the Four Ecologies, by Rainer Banham (LA)

Geographies of New Orleans (reading it now) and Bienvilles' Dilemma, by Richard Campanella (NOLA)

[barante]

My post deals mostly with the racial aspect. I am surprised that the list so far does not include Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier, a groundbreaking study about suburbanization. Another one that should be there is David M.P. Freund's Colored Property. Beryl Satter's recent Family Properties also belongs to the list. And so does Antero Pietila's forthcoming Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City , which will come out in March.
Among other topics the latter book discusses are these:
-- Baltimore's 1910 law that decreed that each residential block in the city be segregated on the basis of the race of the majority of its occupants. The law was widely copied, particularly by Southern cities.
-- After the Supreme Court invalidated that approach in 1917, private agreements known as restrictive covenants became the rage. They had long been used in Baltimore to exclude blacks and Jews.
-- Between 1911 and 1920 Baltimore engaged in a City Hall-sponsored Negro removal project. A mixed race neighborhood next to the courthouse and City Hall proved to be such an embarrassment to the officially segregated city that Mayor Preston ordered it razed. He copied a condemnation law from London, England. With the involvement of planners, a park, named after him, was built at the site.
-- In the mid-1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression-era bailout agency, Home Owners Loan Corporation, redlined 239 U.S. cities, including Baltimore. Jackson discusses this, but Not in My Neighborhood goes further and ties redlining to eugenics, a popular philosophy which believed in white supremacy and categorized non-Aryan nationalities. The book shows how the chief economist of the FHA actually prepared a list of various nationalities in order of their real estate desirability. That list was used both in compiling redlining maps and as a guide in appraisal manuals until the 1960s.
All these national phenomena are discussed in the context of the impact they had on Baltimore. After an exhaustive study of blockbusting, the focus shifts to Baltimore County, a separate jurisdiction. The MIT professor Yale Rabin documented how successive county administrations used zoning to wipe out black residential areas. He discovered examples of similar "expulsive zoning" in more than 40 other communities in various parts of the U.S.
There are plenty of others that deal with race and planning and/or real estate practices. Rose Helper's 1969 Racial Policies & Practices of Real Brokers has been long out of print. A pretty good compilation is Stephen Grant Meyer's As Long as They Don't Move Next Door.
Let me also add the intriguing Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen. It deals with thousands of towns and counties in various parts of the country, but mostly outside the old Confederacy, which expelled African Americans beginning in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Declaration and the Battle of Gettysburg. A Baltimore docklands neighborhood, Locust Point, did this. Blacks had leave the area by nightfall. In many Illinois towns highway signs warned blacks to get out by darkand told blacks. Locust Point longshoremen told blacks that if they moved there, they would die. The Sun, the city's newspaper of record, suggested that the approach was undoubtedly effective.