Are there Urban Planning folks on Masto?
I'm slowly allowing a childhood interest in architecture and infrastructure to grow.
If you have any book recs, whether they're pop culture favorites or foundational educational texts, I'm all ears!
Overwhelmed and grateful for everyone's suggestions and repostings! Here's a summary of everything suggested so far. Please read the thread if you're interested, folks have lots of helpful thoughts
**Books**
**- The Death and Life of Great American Cities** - Jane Jacobs
**- A Pattern Language** - Christopher Alexander et al.
**- Happy City** - Charles Montgomery
**- Streetfight / Street Fight** - Janette Sadik-Khan
**- The High Cost of Free Parking** - Donald Shoup
**- Books by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett** (incl. *Curbing Traffic*)
**- Walkable City** - Jeff Speck
**- Cities of Tomorrow** - Peter Hall
**- The Transit Metropolis** - Robert Cervero
**- How Infrastructure Works** - Deb Chachra (@debcha)
**- Hidden Systems** - Dan Nott
**- The Works** - Kate Ascher
**- Palaces for the People** - Eric Klinenberg
- **Better Buses, Better Cities** - Steven Higashide
**- Human Transit** - Jarrett Walker
**- How Railways Will Fix the Future** - Gareth Dennis
**- Life Between Buildings** - Jan Gehl
**- Bo-miljø** - Ingrid Gehl
**- How Buildings Learn** - Stewart Brand
**- 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School**
**- The Rietveld Schröder House** and **Rietveld: The Architecture of Gerrit Th. Rietveld**
**- Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment** - Matrix
**- Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies** - Leslie Kern
- **There Are No Accidents** - Jessie Singer
**- The Missing Middle** - Daniel Parolek
**- De architectura** - Vitruvius
**- Invisible Cities** - Italo Calvino
**- Practical Engineering** - Grady Hillhouse
**- Carlos Moreno's book** (15-minute cities)
**- Books on Village Homes, Davis, California**
**- The War on Cars book**
**Accounts to Follow**
- @BrentToderian
- @TheWarOnCars
- @notjustbikes
- @citynerd , @OhTheUrbanity , @canadiancivil
- @NickZander
- @debcha
- https://urbanists.social
**Podcasts**
- urbcast
- Gareth Dennis's railway/engineering podcast
**Design Guides**
- NACTO design guides (https://nacto.org/publications/design-guides/)
@ryan The Missing Middle
Sep 3, 2026, 9:28 PM@ryan what a great thread. So glad I caught it.
@ryan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language
(Notable for techies as the architectural pattern language forms the basis of the idea of software development patterns.)
@raganwald unfamiliar with this series and can't wait to dive in!
- Street Fight, by Janette Sadik-Khan
- Curbing Traffic, by the Bruntletts
- Happy City, by Charles Montgomery
- Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, by Leslie Kern
Jane Jacobs's books are always an interesting read.
odd one out, but I find Vitruvius really interesting. You have to acclimatize to the translated classical style, but then there’s a lot of stuff I really didn’t expect. More practical and quotidian and incremental than his reputation.
Sep 3, 2026, 11:48 PM@ryan I'm just a layman, but two of my favorites are "Better Busses Better Cities" by Steven Higashide [1] and "Palaces for the People" by Eric Klinenberg! "Palaces for the People" in particular was something of a life changing book for me, a lot of my current views on the built environment were heavily influenced by that book. I should really give it a re-read.
[1]: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781642830149/better-buses-better-cities
[2]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557044/palaces-for-the-people-by-eric-klinenberg/
@ryan an off the beaten path pick: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/e6db3929-fedf-4f12-944c-b9797ef35757
@Kathmandu @ryan Thank you! HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS has citations and a list of sources. You might like Dan Nott’s HIDDEN SYSTEMS, a graphic explainer of infrastructural systems — our two books complement each other nicely, I think. Kate Ascher’s THE WORKS is also great.
