100 Books Like Habitat

This groundbreaking volume paved the way for a modern understanding of urban heritage and, by this, enabled more focus on resource qualities that can be used to respond to climate change.

Even a few years old, this book marked an important milestone in the evolution of a modern heritage understanding that is now often called the New Heritage Approach. Leveraging the since-then prevalent concept of cultural heritage as objects (buildings), this book elaborates based on the recommendation for the historic urban landscape, an idea of urban heritage that consists of different layers, functions, etc., and emphasizes the relations and connections between these different entities.

Kalman's book on Heritage Management provides a great introduction and overview to the topic. He embraces an integrated and modern understanding of cultural heritage and addresses the potential obstacles heritage managers meet at the crossing points between the different relevant factors.

By focussing on the process, he gives fruitful insights based on case studies from around the world. Climate change, sustainability, and resilience are also integrated into this useful book.

I found this book useful because it describes cases, focuses on transferable principles, and emphasizes that the process is equally important as the desired result. By reading this book and the introduced approach, I really felt encouraged to follow up on my own approach, which I always focus on extracting strategies and principles from good examples because I strongly believe that they can be transferred much better to different places.

I also enjoyed the attention that has been given to… show more.

The key contribution of this book was the systemic understanding of cultural heritage. The collected articles and case studies represent a holistic and integrated concept of cultural heritage. Seeing cultural heritage as a social and political construct, as the authors describe it, opened the door for two new approaches:

First, the integration of different types of heritage that are usually treated separately, e.g., intangible heritage, tangible heritage, etc. And, second, starting to focus on the social parts of cultural heritage, basically the role of people. In my personal view all heritage is only relevant if it is relevant to people, and this book helped me to shape this conviction.

I truly admire how the author connects the different government levels and doesn't shy away from the obvious complexity this brings forward. This big-picture approach is a refreshing alternative to many case-focused articles and books and naturally speaks to my… show more.

Climate change and urban transformation are global phenomena. It is, therefore, always great to broaden your horizons and learn from other regions of the world.

This book from Simone Sandholz offers great insights into the situation in Asia and Latin America, both regions with a strong dynamic of urbanization and urban centers where high density with correlating high diversity of sometimes conflicting urban functions meet urban cultural heritage. She embraces a holistic understanding of this heritage and focuses on the integration of heritage in urban planning and development.

I highly recommend this book not only for scholars and students who are working on urban issues in Asia and Latin America but also for any urban planner, urban analyst, urban geographer, or heritage scientist who wants to learn from experiences in these parts of the world.

For me, this book opened my eyes to the challenges that urban centers in Asia… show more.

Do we need architects for our homes? Well, it seems that in the past they often failed to be there. Bernard Rudovsky, who was himself an architect, featured in 1964 an exhibition dedicated to the topic at the New York MoMA. The related catalogue, Architecture Without Architects, has since then turned into an iconic book. A beautiful set of black and white pictures that describes a primitive state of the art in which skilled but anonymous builders applied throughout the planet the laws of nature giving birth to what is presently labeled as vernacular styles. No names survived despite the talents, in this collection featuring the first steps of architecture, but rationality and functionality are already there, long before Modernism would make them its core principles. It was a pleasant surprise to discover in this book some kind of credit to my belief that medieval castles may have inspired… show more.

Though it was wealthy white planters who built plantations, the enslaved people who worked them imbued these landscapes with their own meanings. With over 200 photographs and drawings of Antebellum plantations, Vlach leads readers on a tour of plantation outbuildings, providing examples of how slaves used these spaces despite—and in defiance of—their masters’ intentions. Testimonies of former slaves (drawn from the Federal Writers’ Project collection) give the reader a sense of what it was like to live and work in these settings.

J. B. Jackson was an iconoclast, each summer riding his motorcycle between Harvard and Berkeley. Jackson saw America from the road and up close, and in his magazine Landscape, he invited readers to see the every day and the prosaic as well.

His writing illuminates topics like the road, commercial architecture, and mobile homes. Before “Learning from Las Vegas,” Jackson asked us to consider what we could learn from the vernacular architecture around us. His writing is theory-free and offers a meditation on seeing what is around us. 

I may be a bit biased on this one since Dr. Goldstein is one of my mentors, but this book really shows the power that narrative has when it comes to understanding illness and assessing risk.

Once Upon a Virus very clearly helps us understand why looking at disease and illness from the standpoint of the community is so important. If we want to promote any type of health behavior or change, we must adapt to the specific community instead of expecting the community to change.

Listening to these stories is crucial for public health and I really wish more people would read this book and understand that!

Even if you have the practical knowledge, it's sometimes necessary to understand the mathematical and theoretical concepts that underlie the machine learning approaches you are using. This book is a great introduction to the world of ML theory.

As adults, we get to a point in our lives where we generally know what we’re good at, and when we’re good at something, it becomes challenging to try new things we know we’ll initially, probably, be very bad at it. It pushes us outside our comfort zone.

Ploszajski is a brilliant materials scientist who bravely heads outside her field on a journey to explore the hands-on world of the materials she knows so well in the lab. It’s an incredibly inspiring read for anyone holding back from trying new skills. It’s hard to come away from this book without having set your heart on taking up a new craft!