Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
by Alain Bertaud · MIT Press
Bridges theory and practice: it treats land and transport quantitatively and with international scope, which the US-focused books do not. Former World Bank principal urban planner Alain Bertaud applies urban economics to planning practice: cities as labor markets, land prices and density gradients, floor-area-ratio limits, transport and commute times, and housing affordability, with data from cities worldwide.
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More resources on Urban Economics & Housing
Strong Towns
A nonprofit advocacy site arguing that North American development patterns are fiscally insolvent, using per-acre tax analysis and incremental street design. Readers come away able to question infrastructure spending and suburban growth on financial grounds.
The Economic Implications of Housing Supply
The core evidence paper behind the YIMBY argument, written for non-specialists. Glaeser and Gyourko compare US house prices with construction costs to estimate the implicit tax that land-use regulation places on development, then trace how constrained supply affects household wealth, mobility to productive regions, and policy choices.
Urban Economics (9th Edition)
The standard undergraduate textbook in urban economics. Its 24 chapters cover why cities form, agglomeration economies, urban growth, land rent and land use, the monocentric model, zoning, housing markets and policy, transportation, and local public finance. This is the textbook rung: it covers the models (bid-rent, monocentric city, housing filtering, congestion pricing) that the popular books and the JEP paper take for granted. I
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It
City planner M. Nolan Gray explains how American zoning works in practice: its origins, minimum lot sizes, single-family districts and parking mandates, their effects on rents, sprawl and segregation, and the reforms, including Houston's approach, proposed to replace it. Covers the zoning mechanics that Glaeser and the papers only reference in the aggregate; it is a reform argument, not a neutral survey, but it is well sourced and the most widely recommended single book on how zoning raises housing costs. It also covers parking mandates, so Shoup's 800-page treatise is not needed alongside it.
Triumph of the City
The standard accessible entry point to the field, written by its leading researcher rather than a journalist. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's general-audience account of why cities exist and thrive: agglomeration and knowledge spillovers, urban decline in places like Detroit, how height limits and preservation raise housing costs, and the environmental case for density.