Understanding Urbanity: 7 Must-Read Books About Cities

What airports have to do with Medieval towns, Brooklyn’s bookstores and Le Corbusier.

“Cities are the crucible of civilization,” proclaimed Geoffrey West at last month’s TED Global. Cities are where most of humanity’s creative and intellectual ideation, communication, and innovation takes place, so understanding cities is vital to understanding our civilization. To help do that, here is an omnibus of seven fantastic books exploring the complex and faceted nature, function, history, and future of urbanity’s precious living organism, from design to sociology to economics and beyond.

WHO’S YOUR CITY

Richard Florida, apart from being one of the most continuously stimulating people to follow on Twitter and a fellow contributor to The Atlantic, is also one of the most insightful people writing and thinking about cities today. In Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, he examines the macro elements of cities, from economy to transportation, through the micro lens of personal happiness. (Which, in fact, makes the book a fine addition to our list of essential books on happiness.) Florida blends heavy-duty statistics and theory with passionately argued ideas and fascinating maps to expose the power of place in its richest, most multidimensional form, revealing the intricate interplay between our cities, our personalities, and our very sense of self and well-being.

The so-called death of place is hardly a new story. First the railroad revolutionized trade and transport like never before. Then the telephone made everyone feel connected and closer. The automobile was invented, then the airplane, and then the World Wide Web — perhaps the quintessential product of a globalized world. All of these technologies have carried the promise of a boundless world. They would free us from geography, allowing us to move out of crowded cities and into lives of our own bucolic choosing. Forget the past, when cities and civilizations were confined to fertile soil, natural ports, or raw materials. In today’s high-tech world, we are free to live wherever we want. Place, according to this increasingly popular view, is irrelevant.

It’s a compelling notion, but it’s wrong. Today’s key economic factors — talent, innovation, and creativity — are not distributed evenly across the global economy. They concentrate in specific locations.”

Ultimately, Who’s Your City?, offers an intelligent blueprint for balancing the trade-offs of place and personality to find, or learn to enjoy, the city and community best tailored to your life, your responsibilities, and your aspirations.

THE CITY IN HISTORY

Originally published in 1952, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by prolific author Lewis Mumford traces the evolution of the urban form throughout human civilization, from the earliest tribal habitats to the towns of the Middle Ages to the vintage-modern commerce hubs of the 1950s. From keenly analyzing the past to accurately assessing the future, Mumford’s insights half a century ago presaged some of the most pressing conversation about cities occupying today’s urbanists, scholars, and civic leaders.

By building up sub-centers, based on pedestrian circulation, within the metropolitan region, a good part of urban transportation difficulties could have been obviated. To make the necessary journeys about the metropolis swift and efficient the number of unnecessary journeys–and the amount of their unnecessary length–must be decreased. Only by bringing work and home closer together can this be achieved.”

But beneath his astute observations of all the ways in which we could (and did) screw up our cities lies an undercurrent of breathless optimism about our capacity for wisdom, betterment, and moral imagination:

But happily life has one predictable attribute: it is full of surprises. At the last moment–and our generation may in fact be close to the last moment–the purposes and projects that will redeem our present aimless dynamism may gain the upper hand. When that happens, obstacles that now seem insuperable will melt away; and the vast sums of money and energy, the massive efforts of science and technics, which now go into the building of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and a hundred other cunning devices directly or indirectly attached to dehumanized and demoralized goals, will be released for the recultivation of the earth and the rebuilding of cities: above all, for the replenishment of the human personality. If once the sterile dreams and sadistic nightmares that obsess the ruling elite are banished, there will be such a release of human vitality as will make the Renascence seem almost a stillbirth.”

ZINESTER’S GUIDE TO NYC

The Zinester’s Guide to NYC is no ordinary city guide. In the age of crowdsourcing and digital everything, it’s a delightfully analog, painstakingly curated tour of all the things that make the Big Apple a cross-cultural icon. From Brooklyn’s bookstores to the midday madness of Midtown to the peculiar cultures of different neighborhoods, ZG2NYC is a remarkable achievement of urban curiosity, beautifully illustrated with original artwork, spanning everything from architecture to art to culinary curiosity and beyond. In the eloquently laconic words of Stephen Colbert’s review, “it kicks ass.”

For sure, use your device to double check addresses and hours, but then stash it, man! Your eyes and ears and nose remain excellent portals for receiving, interpreting, and storing information. I get that it could be fun to review your email on the subway, but if you’re always doing that, you are never going to sketch the person seated across from you. Ten years from now, which will prove the better key to this long forgotten day? A deleted digital message (received on a no doubt archaic device) or an inexpert but keenly observed rendering born of being wholly present in the exterior word?

Don’t miss our offbeat interview with Halliday, accompanied by more images from the book.

AEROTROPOLIS

For much of human civilization, cities — the places where people gather around and exchange money, goods, and ideas — have been defined by transportation hubs, from ports to railway stations. In Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, academic researcher and urban adviser John Kasarda and journalist Greg Lindsay examine today’s most important transit hub, the airport, as an epicenter of tomorrow’s civilization in the shape of the “aerotropolis” — a combination of enormous airport, planned metropolis, and commerce cluster. Both radical and practical, the aerotropolis lives at the intersection of urbanism, civic engineering, sociology, international relations, economics, cartography, and design to offer a compelling vision for our emergent urban future.

The aerotropolis is the urban incarnation of [the] physical Internet; the primacy of air transport makes airports and their hinterlands the places to see how it functions — and to observe the consequences. The three rules of real estate have changed from location, location, location to accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. There’s a new metric. It’s no longer space; it’s time and cost. And if you look closely at the aerotropolis, what appears to be sprawl is slowly evolving into a system of reducing both. It’s here where we can see how globalization will reshape our cities, lives, and culture.”

Amazon has an excellent Q&A with Lindsay.

Thanks, Sean

TRIUMPH OF THE CITY

Thirty-six million people inhabit the greater Tokyo area, the world’s most productive city, and nearly 70% of the U.S. population live in 3% of the country’s land area, yet we do so with the constant civic guilt, perpetuated by the media, about the wasteful, unhealthy, crime-ridden, ecologically unreasonable ways of city life. In Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, pioneering urban economist Edward Glaeser debunks a number of popular myths about the ills of cities to reveal, through examples past and present, how and why cities can in fact be a model for optimal well-being, both human and of the environment. (Did you know that urbanites use 40% less energy than their suburban counterparts, and both cancer and heart disease are significantly lower in New York City than the American national average?)

The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilization’s success and the primary reason why cities exist. To understand our cities and what to do about them, we must hold on to these truths and dispatch harmful myths. We must discard the view that environmentalism means living around trees and that urbanites should always fight to preserve a city’s physical past. We must stop idolizing home ownership, which favors suburban tract homes over high-rise apartments, and stop romanticizing rural villages. We should eschew the simplistic view that better long-distance communication will reduce our desire and need to be near one another. Above all, we must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.”

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES

Jane Jacos is easily history’s most important writer in urban planning. Her massively influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities, originally published in 1961, is a book so central to the last half-century of urbanism that it’s almost an embarrassment to mention it in any kind of introductory context. Rather than a hapless attack on then-new planning policies and their negative impact on inner-city communities, Jacobs offers an intelligent, constructive critique that proposes new principles for planning and rebuilding smart, functional cities, debunking the widely held belief that if only we had enough money, we’d wipe out the slums, reverse urban decay, anchor the wandering tax money of the middle class, and even solve the traffic problem — a belief, mind you, that has metastasized all more dangerously in contemporary culture, some half a century later.

But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lackluster imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”

In addition to the meat of the book, buried in its first pages is Jacobs’ curious aside about illustration, alluding to the creative medium’s role as a sensemaking mechanism for the world:

The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might also listen, linger and think about what you see.”

MAKESHIFT METROPOLIS

While the work of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford may have shaped generations of thinking about cities, much has changed since their ideas were coined half a century ago as our technology, economic mechanisms, design processes, and political priorities have evolved. In Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, University of Pennsylvania urbanism professor and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski explores what these changes mean for envisioning the optimal city of tomorrow. Rybczynski, who 16 years ago started teaching design and development to MBAs and real estate majors at Penn’s Wharton School of Business, summarizes what he has learned about city planning and urban development through data-driven insights about the present and future of cities at the intersection of sociology, design, and behavioral economics, as well as fascinating urban innovation projects from around the world that challenge the definition of a city in an era of changing human demands and resource availability.

From Mumford to Jacobs, from Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright, from public parks to high-tech skyscrapers, from Buffalo to Boston, Rybczynski spans an incredible spectrum of material to explain why we behave the way we behave, live the way we live, and choose what we choose — and, more importantly, how these seminal ideas about cities can be built upon to shape the 21st-century city, with all its liveliness, heterogeneity, and multifunctionality.

Is a city the result of design intentions, or of market forces, or a bit of both? These are the questions I explore in this book.”

Intelligent and highly readable, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities embodies the Brain Pickings ethos of cross-disciplinary curiosity, of lateral connections, of knowing and understanding the thinking of the past in order to envision and frame the ideas of the future.

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Astonish Me: A Beautiful Short Film About the Mysteries of Nature

What Harry Potter has to do with the enigmas of the natural world and the beauty of the unknown.

For all our intellectual inquiries and creative contemplation, our scientific progress and our technological innovation, nature remains largely an enigma, a relentlessly fascinating source of mystery. We often forget that, but the World Wildlife Fund, in celebration of its 50th anniversary, has teamed up with acclaimed British playwright Stephen Poliakoff and director Charles Sturridge to remind us of just that. Astonish Me is a beautiful short film about curiosity and wonder, nature’s lifeblood, showcasing some of the extraordinary species recently discovered around the world. It’s Harry Potter meets The Census for Marine Life meets Nabokov’s butterflies — a wondrous journey into the magic of the unknown that still surrounds us.

Every day we lose more of the natural world. And each time we find something new, we realize there’s so much more out there that we don’t know.”

Here’s a sneak peek of the astonishing making of Astonish Me:

via Open Culture

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Book of Ice: DJ Spooky’s Cross-Disciplinary Antarctica Project

What emancipated penguins have to do with digital archives, propaganda art and the future of remix culture.

Antarctica is a strange kind of no man’s land — a territory owned by no single country, with no government, formally uninhabited and hardy inhabitable, and yet of endless allure to researchers, explorers, artists and curious minds from all over the world. It’s also the closest thing we have to a geological clock, its ice sheath reflecting the transformation of our atmosphere and climate with striking precision. In 2007, fascinated by the enigmatic continent’s peculiarities, artist, thinker and musician Paul D. Miller — whose investigation of remix culture and collaborative creation you might recall — traveled to Antarctica to shoot a film about the sound of ice. That was the start of Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica — a larger multimedia project aiming to capture a dynamic portrait of this rapidly changing microcosm. The project’s latest incarnation, The Book of Ice, arrives this month — a poignant reflection on humanity’s relationship with the frozen neverland and climate change at large, by way of poetic visual and textual meditations ranging from archival images of historic exploration on the continent (including these rare photos of the first Australian expedition in 1911) to maps to timelines to hypothetical propaganda art for an imaginary Antarctica liberation movement.

Perhaps most compellingly, the project is a living testament to cross-disciplinary creativity, touching on disciplines as diverse as history, information visualization, music composition, propaganda art, media theory and more, with influences as varied as Emory Douglas, Rodchenko, Mirko Illic and Alex Steinweiss.

Today, I sit down with DJ Spooky to chat about the creative impetus behind the project, its most compelling insights, and the longer-term vision for Antarctica’s future.

How did the idea for The Book of Ice, and the larger project to which it belongs, first emerge?

The Book of Ice started as graphic design music scores taken from my Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica project. I wanted to fine-tune the book as an extension of some of my obsessions with climate change. The first soundtrack and symphony written about Antarctica was by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1948, but other composers — Handel’s 1717 AD composition entitled simply “Water Music” or John Luther Adams Arctic compositions, or even more close to home John Cage’s 1936 first composition for turntables “Imaginary Landscape,” Charles Ives “Central Park in The Dark,” or Cornelius Cardew’s graphic design scores — are all influences.

I guess you could say The Book of Ice is an inter-connected, hyper-expandable/scalable museum/gallery show, book, and symphony. Simple!

Antarctica – a place that no one owns, with no government or law, yet belonging to everyone – seems to be a beautiful metaphor for remix culture. Given your background, was this in any way part of the allure? How did you incorporate your work on and beliefs about remix culture into the Antarctica project?

I wanted to show the Utopian/Dystopian aspects of how graphic design interacts with geopolitics and propaganda. Me, Shep Fairey (an old friend) and Steve Heller spoke at Phaidon books a little while ago about this, from the beginnings of “The War on Terror” you can go back to stuff like DW Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” and other texts that give people a feigned sense of oppression. My Antarctica remix project would have to include how people despoil the planet, our “commons” and what if people started to say everyone has a right to clean air and water, to having food untainted by mercury or nuclear isotopes?

What has been the most startling, unexpected insight that emerged for the creative process on the project?

I guess I always naively think that if you put information in front of people, they’ll get it. They don’t. This project is Utopian in that it seems like the bleedingly obvious fact that our species might not get out of this century in too good condition is being ignored. Ice sheets are melting. Water is scarce. Global weather patterns are the most complex phenomena we’ve encountered.

Adam Smith wrote, ‘all money is a matter of belief.’ The realm of the possible is always greater than the realm of the real. I try to navigate between the two: that’s art.

Can, and should, Antarctica liberate itself from the rest of the world? If so, how?

The title for the Manifesto for a People’s Republic of Antarctica comes from a science fiction book of the same title by John Calvin Batchelor. OK: nation state rises from the ruins of world geopolitics. Check. Environmental collapse, even though we know we can do better and avoid it. Check. Dumb politicians run all major nation states into the ground. Check. It’s great material for propaganda prints, but it could just as easily be a video game like Vice City or Halo. People like to have ‘narrative,’ so I thought, let’s give them something different. It would be cool to have Antarctica as strictly a “commons.”

What’s next for the project, and for you as an artist and explorer?

Part 2 to the The Book of Ice / Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica goes in two different directions. I’m setting up a contemporary art center in the South Pacific in the island nation of Vanuatu.

And I’m writing a group of compositions about the North Pole. Both are in development now. One of the first media spoofs of the 20th century was when Frederick A. Cook, a Brooklyn milkman who, made a film that claimed he was the first person to discover the North Pole and a fake story got put on the front of every major newspaper. There’s something very Orson Welles to that idea. I found the film, remixed it as a component of the Antarctica project DVD. You can see all of this and the material used to generate the compositions as extensions of my obsession with sampling. It’s just taken me a little further into the realm of info-aesthetics.

After all, I can basically just say music for me isn’t just music. It’s information.

The Book of Ice comes from Mark Batty Publisher and is the kind of cross-disciplinary gem we love to love.

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