Books like Edge City — picked by fans

This eye-opening book was a revelation to me as a young student of architecture. It provided the keys to how cities really work. Its observations are as relevant and fresh today as they were when it was published in 1961. For me and many in my generation, it helped us to see and appreciate the organic, human-centered dynamics of neighborhoods, introducing the powerful concept of “organized complexity,” which made sense of things we saw but failed to understand.

I met Jane in Toronto in 1968 where she became a lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 2006. It remains a foundational text for me in understanding urban life and my life’s work. 

New sections of cities, new neighborhoods, and big infrastructure projects are aspirational for societies. They aren’t just about problem-solving. In this great book, historian Robert Fishman shows how London and Paris developed differently because they had different ideals and different aspirations.

As it began to grow due to industrialization in the late 18th century, London prioritized the development of townhouses, its urban ideal. This caused it to become a sprawling, low-rise city. Paris developed in the mid-19th century as a city of glamorous, stylish apartment buildings because this was Paris’s ideal.

Parisians valued the street and cultural life that apartment life generated. The title of this book is off-putting for me because it sounds so academic. But Fishman, a trained historian, writes well and gives you big ideas and details in a readable package. 

I can still remember so much from this book. A great stat Hawes included was that in the year 1870, 90 percent of upper-class New Yorkers lived in townhouses or other types of single-family homes. By 1930, 90 percent lived in apartment buildings or “French flats,” as they were sometimes called. Basically, almost alone among American cities, New York chose to emulate Paris in its model of urbanism rather than London.

New York developers built and sold “French flats” that were large and ostentatious, like the Ansonia and the Dakota, which are still there today. These iconic apartment buildings were built along the streetcar and subway lines. Hawes was a writer for The New Yorker, so this is very readable.

Accurate prophets are few, but in the title essay of this book, the critic Lewis Mumford tells with eerie precedence just how the United States of America will be transformed, often for the worse, by the overinvestment in highways and the neglect of railroads.

Mumford originally wrote this for The New Yorker, where he was the in-house architecture critic. As the country was going all in on the new Interstate Highway System, Mumford was one of the few who foresaw the flaws of this one-dimensional megaproject. 

Lassiter presents a nuanced examination of how social and political conflicts in Richmond, Atlanta, and Charlotte during enabled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to resurrect the GOP from its 1964 electoral disaster through reliance, not on a “southern strategy,” as many pundits have long claimed, but rather on a suburban strategy that involved the complex interplay of race, class, and other factors. 

The messages that enabled the GOP to gain traction in the suburban South, Lassiter emphasizes, worked across the nation. The South was not as different as many observers have long claimed. Lassiter also chronicles how these conflicts reshaped the Democratic Party in the South, as by the early 1970s more moderate figures such Jimmy Carter had supplanted the staunch segregationists of decades past.

This book is the first to finally put to rest the blame-the-victim causal explanations for homelessness. Using economic and geographic data, Colburn and Aldern show that homelessness is the result of poverty, but not only poverty; for example, Detroit has low rates of homelessness.

Essential is the existence of economic inequities combined with the unavailability of affordable housing, for example, in New York City. This book makes my teaching about homelessness so much easier.

This is an Urban Land Institute publication by lead author Rick Peiser—a longtime Harvard University Graduate School of Design faculty member—and a large group of additional contributors. PRED is especially useful for those taking management or developmental roles in the commercial real estate industry. It’s systematic, comprehensive, and logically organized. It’s also expensive, but then again, it’s 400 pages long. Spring for the hardcover edition—easier to work with, and well worth the investment. 

Listen up Jane Austen fans! I know we have our faves and it's a touchy subject comparing which one is the best, but let's go ahead and throw Dorsey Fitzgerald and DJ Liza Bennet’s names into the hat please, please, and please!

I absolutely love this modern take on Pride and Prejudice. I also got a kick out of the chapter titles as well as the supporting family cast. Talk about a juicy retelling with lots of moving parts. Gentrification is a real, relevant, and current thing, and the novel hits all the right themes.

While reading, I knew the romance would deliver a happy ever after, but how? This is where Pride and Protest shines. Such a great take on the original classic!

Pamela Kelley makes historical fiction come to life on the page in this rags-to-riches story that empowers women during an unheard-of time, as Eliza Chapman, a lady’s maid, learns her father is actually one of the richest men in NYC, and this changes her whole world.

For anyone who has ever lived in a loft or aspired to live in one, this book tells the story of how loft living came into being, how it started with artists seeking a place to live with low rent and large spaces for studios they found in old manufacturing buildings.

I have used this story to teach about innovation and how artists were ahead of both government policy and real estate developers in finding value in spaces they occupied illegally! This is a classic book about an unexpected urban transformation that morphed into a chic lifestyle.