Strong Towns
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.
More resources on Urban Planning
Planetizen
Daily news, opinion, and job listings for the North American urban planning field, published since 2000. Useful for tracking policy debates, zoning reform, and transportation projects as practitioners argue about them in real time.
Reclaiming the Street for Livable Urban Spaces
Coursera course from the University of Amsterdam and EIT Urban Mobility on moving cities away from car-dominated streets, covering mobility transition theory, temporary street experiments, citizen activism versus bureaucracy and international case studies, ending with a written plan for local street change.
Cities for People
Jan Gehl's synthesis of forty years of observing how people use streets, squares and buildings. Sets out design principles at the human scale (eye level, walking speed, edges, density) for lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities, with 500+ photos and drawings.
City Beautiful Planning Basics (Video Textbook)
This is a short, current, academically-grounded survey that maps the whole field before the books go deep : five-episode video textbook, each 10-20 minutes, covering the core pillars of city planning: land use, transportation, environment, housing and social justice. Made by a planning professor as a free companion to an introductory planning course.
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
A documented history of how federal, state and local policy created residential segregation in the United States. It covers racial zoning, FHA underwriting, public housing siting, restrictive covenants and highway routing.
Human Transit (Revised Edition): How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives
A transit planning consultant sets out the geometry and trade-offs behind public transit networks: frequency versus coverage, grid networks, connections, and walking distance to stops. It uses them to judge transit proposals regardless of mode.