Here are 95 books that Collaborative Planning fans have personally recommended if you like Collaborative Planning. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Urban Regeneration and Social Sustainability: Best Practice from European Cities

Müge Akkar Ercan Author Of Regeneration, Heritage and Sustainable Communities in Turkey: Challenges, Complexities and Potentials

From my list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings. 

Müge's book list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities

Müge Akkar Ercan Why Müge loves this book

I think this book is very illuminating in learning the social aspect of sustainability.

She particularly focuses on urban regeneration projects in European cities. It shows how social sustainability can be assessed, measured, and monitored by using various regeneration projects in five European cities (Sant Adria de Besos in Spain, Turin in Italy, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Leipzig in Germany, and Cardiff in the UK).

I like this book because of its comprehensive assessment of the social sustainability of these projects by examining the institutional arrangements, financial products and tools, stakeholders’ involvement, and their contribution, monitoring, and measurement systems. In this way, it provides us with a new framework for assessing social sustainability. 

By Andrea Colantonio , Tim Dixon ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Urban Regeneration and Social Sustainability as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Urban regeneration is a key focus for public policy throughout Europe. This book examines social sustainability and analyses its meaning and significance - an area of research which has, until now, been comparatively neglected. The authors offer a comprehensive European perspective to identify best practice in sustainable urban regeneration in five major cities in Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. Urban Regeneration & Social Sustainability: best practice from European cities examines the extent to which social sustainability is incorporated within urban regeneration projects in the EU, but also investigates how local authorities, developers, investors and other key stakeholders approach…


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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Book cover of Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition

Müge Akkar Ercan Author Of Regeneration, Heritage and Sustainable Communities in Turkey: Challenges, Complexities and Potentials

From my list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings. 

Müge's book list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities

Müge Akkar Ercan Why Müge loves this book

This is a landmark book that provides an interdisciplinary and global analysis of the 20th-century cities. 

Graham and Marvin conceive the city as a flow process, and they examine the networked infrastructure of cities such as transport, communication, energy, water, and street networks.

What I like about this book is that it helps readers to understand the complexity and the sociotechnical processes of modern cities by using urban network infrastructure and providing examples across scales from local to global examples. This book also shows us how to approach modern cities with an interdisciplinary approach by using social theories such as actor-network theory, political economy, and relational theories. 

By Steve Graham , Simon Marvin ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Splintering Urbanism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Splintering Urbanism makes an international and interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. It delivers a new and powerful way of understanding contemporary urban change, bringing together discussions about:
*globalization and the city
*technology and society
*urban space and urban networks
*infrastructure and the built environment
*developed, developing and post-communist worlds.
With a range of case studies, illustrations and boxed examples, from New York to Jakarta, Johannesberg to Manila and Sao Paolo to Melbourne, Splintering Urbanism demonstrates the latest social, urban and technological theories, which give us an understanding of our contemporary metropolis.


Book cover of Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy

Müge Akkar Ercan Author Of Regeneration, Heritage and Sustainable Communities in Turkey: Challenges, Complexities and Potentials

From my list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings. 

Müge's book list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities

Müge Akkar Ercan Why Müge loves this book

This is one of my favourite books, as it provides a rigorous analysis of the environmental policy in the US from the 1970s and 2010.

It pinpoints the successes and failures of these policies at the subnational, regional, and state levels by using several case studies such as air and water pollution control, state and local climate change policy, open space preservation, urban growth, and regional ecosystem management.

What I also really like about this book is that readers can see various meanings of sustainability and understand that the concept can serve as a roadmap, which helps settlement systems evolve in a sustainable way.

By Daniel A. Mazmanian (editor) , Michael E. Kraft (editor) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Toward Sustainable Communities as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This analysis of U.S. environmental policy offers a conceptual framework that serves as a valuable roadmap to the array of laws, programs, and approaches developed over the last four decades. Combining case studies and theoretical discussion, the book views environmental policy in the context of three epochs: the rise of command-and-control federal regulation in the 1970s, the period of efficiency-based reform efforts that followed, and the more recent trend toward sustainable development and integrated approaches at local and regional levels. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the new approaches and places these experiments within the larger framework of an…


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Book cover of Trusting Her Duke

Trusting Her Duke by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.

Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…

Book cover of Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice

Müge Akkar Ercan Author Of Regeneration, Heritage and Sustainable Communities in Turkey: Challenges, Complexities and Potentials

From my list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings. 

Müge's book list on critical urbanism and building sustainable communities

Müge Akkar Ercan Why Müge loves this book

This is another favourite book of mine because it rigorously shows communities' environmental inequalities. Agyeman identifies the critical problems of local communities regarding environmental inequalities by reviewing a series of small cases and one larger case in the US.

I like Agyeman’s reviews of these cases because they allow readers to draw valuable lessons and inspire ideas for re-interpreting environmental injustices in different localities. I also like the methodology of the book, which can be used in different localities as an approach to measuring environmental justice.

By defining performance, outcome, and accountability indicators, Agyeman helps us to measure progress toward sustainability.

By Julian Agyeman ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Argues that environmental justice and the sustainable communities movement are compatible
Popularized in the movies Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, "environmental justice" refers to any local response to a threat against community health. In this book, Julian Agyeman argues that environmental justice and the sustainable communities movement are compatible in practical ways. Yet sustainability, which focuses on meeting our needs today while not compromising the ability of our successors to meet their needs, has not always partnered with the challenges of environmental justice.
Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice explores the ideological differences between these two groups…


Book cover of Responsive Environments

Antony Radford Author Of The Elements of Modern Architecture: Understanding Contemporary Buildings

From my list on analysing architecture.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion as a teacher and writer is to help students and others interpret, understand and enjoy architecture and the built environment, and to help them respond in their own designs to the complexities of place, people, and construction. I have chosen five well-established books on analysing architecture that are highly illustrated, avoid jargon, can be explored rather than needing to be read sequentially cover-to-cover, and have lasting value. They offer guidance for beginning students and a checklist for the experienced. They are books to be kept handy and repeatedly consulted. Of course, analysing existing architecture is invaluable in designing new architecture. I hope you enjoy them.

Antony's book list on analysing architecture

Antony Radford Why Antony loves this book

This book is as much about urban design and landscape architecture as about architecture, its annotated sketches demonstrating how good places respond to their contexts.

I like its straightforward, practical, and concise approach. Although billed as ‘a manual for designers’, it is equally useful in analysing why some environments work, both practically and emotionally, and others don’t.

It is opinionated, not afraid to criticise as well as applaud. 

By Ian Bentley (editor) , Alan Alcock , Paul Murrain , Sue McGlynn , Graham Smith

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Responsive Environments as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Clearly demonstrates the specific characteristics that make for comprehensible, friendly and controllable places; 'Responsive Environments' - as opposed to the alienating environments often imposed today. By means of sketches and diagrams, it shows how they may be designed in to places or buildings.

This is a practical book about architecture and urban design. It is most concerned with the areas of design which most frequently go wrong and impresses the idea that ideals alone are not enough. Ideals must be linked through appropriate design ideas to the fabric of the built environemnt itself. This book is a practical attempt to…


Book cover of Experiencing Architecture

Witold Rybczynski Author Of Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City

From my list on architecture for non-architects.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I’ve written more than twenty books on a variety of subjects, I was trained as an architect and I’ve designed and built houses, researched low cost housing, and taught budding architects for four decades. I was architecture critic for Wigwag and Slate and I’ve written for numerous national magazines and newspapers. Perhaps more important, my wife and I built our own house, mixing concrete, sawing wood, and hammering nails. I wrote a book about that, too.

Witold's book list on architecture for non-architects

Witold Rybczynski Why Witold loves this book

Many books about architecture are like cookbooks, that is, they are written for the cook—the architect—and are concerned with how to make the stuff. But for the lay person, the joy of architecture lies in the actual experience of buildings; good architecture makes you feel good. This classic, written in 1962 by a wise old Dane, is a wonderful guide to the many sensory ways in which we experience buildings, old and new.

By Steen Eiler Rasmussen ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Experiencing Architecture as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A classic examination of superb design through the centuries.

Widely regarded as a classic in the field, Experiencing Architecture explores the history and promise of good design. Generously illustrated with historical examples of designing excellence—ranging from teacups, riding boots, and golf balls to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of Beijing's Winter Palace—Rasmussen's accessible guide invites us to appreciate architecture not only as a profession, but as an art that shapes everyday experience.

In the past, Rasmussen argues, architecture was not just an individual pursuit, but a community undertaking. Dwellings were built with a natural feeling for place,…


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Book cover of The Duke's Christmas Redemption

The Duke's Christmas Redemption by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.

Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…

Book cover of From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City

Witold Rybczynski Author Of Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City

From my list on architecture for non-architects.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I’ve written more than twenty books on a variety of subjects, I was trained as an architect and I’ve designed and built houses, researched low cost housing, and taught budding architects for four decades. I was architecture critic for Wigwag and Slate and I’ve written for numerous national magazines and newspapers. Perhaps more important, my wife and I built our own house, mixing concrete, sawing wood, and hammering nails. I wrote a book about that, too.

Witold's book list on architecture for non-architects

Witold Rybczynski Why Witold loves this book

If you’ve ever wondered why modern buildings look the way they do—and look so different from say, the buildings of our grandparents’ generation—you cannot do better than read this collection of essays that examines the current state of modern architecture. Glazer, a sociologist who was a noted public intellectual, brings a down-to-earth intelligence and a sharp eye to his subject.

By Nathan Glazer ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked From a Cause to a Style as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions…


Book cover of Court and Garden: From the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architecture

Joan DeJean Author Of How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City

From my list on what makes a city great, especially Paris.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve lived in cities all my adult life and currently divide my time between Paris and Philadelphia. And while those two cities are strikingly different places, they have in common the fact that they are both great walking cities –- urban centers that can be explored on foot and easily enjoyed by pedestrians. Walking cities, I believe, provide not only an ideal context for today’s tourists but also a model for a future in which urban dwellers become less reliant on automobiles and urban centers more open to foot traffic than to vehicular pollution and congestion. The books I’ll recommend deal in various ways with the building and rebuilding of visionary cities, and of Paris in particular.

Joan's book list on what makes a city great, especially Paris

Joan DeJean Why Joan loves this book

This book focuses on the role of modern architecture in Paris, and by “modern,” Dennis has in mind the architecture created during the reinvention of Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dennis provides the best introduction to a crucial factor in Paris’s essence: the particular kind of residential architecture that became characteristic of the cityscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the hôtel or townhouse. Great architecture helps make a city great, and in Paris in particular, much of the greatest modern architecture was originally residential – grand townhouses built for the wealthiest Parisians.

Today, most of these townhouses have become museums, government ministries, foreign embassies. With its focus on the relation between public and private space in the city and the ways in which residential architecture can and should function in relation to the streets and the public space in which it is embedded, Dennis’s work is essential…

By Michael Dennis ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Court and Garden as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The "tyranny of the private realm" is destroying our cities. Modern architecture, with its insistence on the mute object and its rejection of the conventions of street and square, has abdicated civic responsibility and eschewed the urban forms that express and promote it. In this eloquent and extensively illustrated study of the evolution of a modern conception of space, Michael Dennis explores the social, psychological, and especially the formal transformations that that led architects to trade the city of public space for a city of private icons. The French hôtel, an aristocratic town house developed largely in Paris between 1550…


Book cover of The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities

Joan DeJean Author Of How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City

From my list on what makes a city great, especially Paris.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve lived in cities all my adult life and currently divide my time between Paris and Philadelphia. And while those two cities are strikingly different places, they have in common the fact that they are both great walking cities –- urban centers that can be explored on foot and easily enjoyed by pedestrians. Walking cities, I believe, provide not only an ideal context for today’s tourists but also a model for a future in which urban dwellers become less reliant on automobiles and urban centers more open to foot traffic than to vehicular pollution and congestion. The books I’ll recommend deal in various ways with the building and rebuilding of visionary cities, and of Paris in particular.

Joan's book list on what makes a city great, especially Paris

Joan DeJean Why Joan loves this book

I recommend Joseph Rykwert’s The Seduction of Place for Rykwert’s wonderful reflections on the relation between people and their cities, and on the essential questions of why cities succeed – or why they fail to work successfully for their inhabitants.

By Joseph Rykwert ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Seduction of Place as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Eminent architectural historian, Jospeh Rykwert looks at the complex story of the city since the industrial revolution. He draws on sociology, social, economic and political history and their complex interactions with the history of architecture. Rykwert's knowledge of world cities is remarkable, and the book will draw on Shanghai as much as Los Angeles, Rio as well as London, Melbourne as well as Paris, both in looking at past developments and for models for the future. His book is also a timely celebration of metropolitan values that have recently been denigrated: tolerance, liberalism, cultural vitality, pluralism. It is an important…


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Book cover of Old Man Country

Old Man Country by Thomas R. Cole,

This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.

In these and other intimate conversations, the book…

Book cover of Designing Your Natural House

Jeanie and David Stiles Author Of Cabin: A Guide to Building the Perfect Getaway

From my list on hand-illustrated books on building.

Why are we passionate about this?

As the authors of 27 hand-illustrated books, we are acutely aware of the time and skill required for good rendering. We are old-schoolers ourselves, having cut our teeth on “how-to” books before computers came into vogue. Our readers often tell us that a computer drawing does not have the same appeal and clarity as hand drawing. We are able to ‘talk’ a reader through the process of building something with our drawings. We have also found that the best illustrated books often have the best content!

Jeanie's book list on hand-illustrated books on building

Jeanie and David Stiles Why Jeanie loves this book

This is an outlier that maybe not many have heard about or read. It features two award-winning designers who define, and illustrate, some 200 “rules of good architecture”. The artwork and lettering are by Malcolm Wells—an architect well-known for his sharp wit and off-beat leanings (underground houses being one). The messaging is accurate and timeless. The tone is light, as is the author’s back-and-forth banter. Wells’s illustrations bring the message home with clarity and force. It is a book that is at the same time funny, useful, and beautiful. Good luck finding one! 

Book cover of Urban Regeneration and Social Sustainability: Best Practice from European Cities
Book cover of Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition
Book cover of Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy

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Interested in architecture, urbanism, and philosophy?

Architecture 86 books
Urbanism 13 books
Philosophy 1,933 books