Late last year, Curbed published an annotated list: 101 Books About Where and How We Live. I read a lot and I’ve read only about half of the books on the list. I recommend starting anywhere on the list: even the books here that I personally disagree with make important arguments and have been widely influential.
I have a few recommendations among the less-well-known titles:
- The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher. For the visually-minded, this is a great summary of how modern infrastructure operates.
- High Rise by J.G. Ballard. Recently made into a movie, this novel expresses the horror that modern architecture (and particularly Brutalism) caused in certain circles. Not for the squeamish, architecturally or otherwise.
- Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell will make you nostalgic for a New York you almost certainly are too young to have known.
- Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas was famous thirty years ago, but now seems lost. A great description of the intersection of people’s lives and urban policy.
And one that in my opinion should have made the list but didn’t: Report From Engine Co. 82 by Dennis Smith. This is a memoir by a New York firefighter of working in the South Bronx as it was burning down. I’ve never read a better description of the connection between people’s lives and their physical surroundings.
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