A globe-trotting, eye-opening exploration of how cities can--and do--make us happier people

Charles Montgomery's Happy City is revolutionizing the way we think about urban life.
After decades of unchecked sprawl, more people than ever are moving back to the city. Dense urban living has been prescribed as a panacea for the environmental and resource crises of our time. But is it better or worse for our happiness? Are subways, sidewalks, and condo towers an improvement on the car dependence of the suburbs?
The award-winning journalist Charles Montgomery finds answers to such questions at the intersection between urban design and the emerging science of happiness, during an exhilarating journey through some of the world's most dynamic cities. He meets the visionary mayor who introduced a sexy bus to ease status anxiety in Bogotá; the architect who brought the lessons of medieval Tuscan hill towns to modern-day New York City; the activist who turned Paris's urban freeways into beaches; and an army of American suburbanites who have hacked the design of their own streets and neighborhoods.
Rich with new insights from psychology, neuroscience, and Montgomery's own urban experiments, Happy City reveals how cities can shape our thoughts as well as our behavior. The message is ultimately as surprising as it is hopeful: by retrofitting cities and our own lives for happiness, we can tackle the urgent challenges of our age. The happy city can save the world--and we can all help build it.

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its initial publication, this special edition of Jane Jacobs's masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, features a new Introduction by Jason Epstein, the book's original editor, who provides an intimate perspective on Jacobs herself and unique insights into the creation and lasting influence of this classic.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. . . . It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments. Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs's tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable.

Cities define the lives of all those who call them home: where we go, how we get there, how we spend our time. But what if we rethink the ways we plan, live in, and move around our cities? What if we didn't need a car to reach the grocery store? What if we could get back the time we would have spent commuting and put it to other uses?

In this fascinating, carefully researched and reported book, longtime Financial Times journalist Natalie Whittle investigates the 15-minute city idea--its pros, cons, and its potential to revolutionize modern living.

From Paris, Melbourne, and Rotterdam to Charlotte, North Carolina, and Tempe, Arizona, cities worldwide are being guided by the 15-minute city's ideals--with varying results. By looking at these examples, Whittle considers:

• what really happens when a city expands bike lanes and pedestrian areas--and disincentivizes long commutes
• which approaches to building affordable housing are actually effective
• how neighborhoods of varying wealth are affected by 15-minute city policies
• whether it's possible to convince car-owning city dwellers to replace their vehicles with other forms of transport.

This timely book serves as a call to reflect on our cities and neighborhoods--and it outfits us with insights on how to make them more sustainable, safe, and welcoming.

The author presents a behind the scenes look at the secretive international policies of the British government and how their successes allowed them to rise to the top of a vast secret order of World Finance. According to the author, he has pieced enough information together, presented in this book, which clearly shows that a colossal financial and political organization is run from a area of London called The City. Due to its power, The City is claimed to operate as a super-government of the world, and plays some kind of role or has influence in virtually every major world event.

The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance.

P. E. Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. In the new preface, Moskowitz stresses just how little has changed in those same cities and how the problems of gentrification are proliferating throughout America.

The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. A vigorous, hard-hitting exposé, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities and how we can get it back.

In 1980, William H. Whyte published the findings from his revolutionary Street Life Project in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Both the book and the accompanying film were instantly labeled classics, and launched a mini-revolution in the planning and study of public spaces. They have since become standard texts, and appear on syllabi and reading lists in urban planning, sociology, environmental design, and architecture departments around the world.

Project for Public Spaces, which grew out of Holly's Street Life Project and continues his work around the world, has acquired the reprint rights to Social Life, with the intent of making it available to the widest possible audience and ensuring that the Whyte family receive their fair share of Holly's legacy.

From the forward:

For more than 30 years, Project for Public Spaces has been using observations, surveys, interviews and workshops to study and transform public spaces around the world into community places. Every week we give presentations about why some public spaces work and why others don't, using the techniques, ideas, and memorable phrases from William H. Holly Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.

Holly Whyte was both our mentor and our friend. Perhaps his most important gift was the ability to show us how to discover for ourselves why some public spaces work and others don't. With the publication of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces and its companion film in 1980, the world could see that through the basic tools of observation and interviews, we can learn an immense amount about how to make our cities more livable. In doing so, Holly Whyte laid the groundwork for a major movement to change the way public spaces are built and planned. It is our pleasure to offer this important book back to the world it is helping to transform.

Ken Bernstein, a Principal City Planner for the City of Los Angeles and a national advocate for historic preservation shares how Los Angeles has led the nation in historic preservation and how other cities can do the same with his Los Angeles Times bestseller.

2021 Foreword Indies, GOLD: Regional

Los Angeles has an image as the City of the Future--a city always at the cutting edge of change--but also as a throwaway metropolis that cares little about its history or architectural legacy. Yet the reality is quite different. Over the past decade, the City of Los Angeles has developed one of the most successful historic preservation programs in the nation, culminating with the completion of the nation's most ambitious citywide survey of historic resources. All across the city, historic preservation is now transforming Los Angeles, while also pointing the way to how other cities can use preservation to revitalize their neighborhoods and build community. Preserving Los Angeles: How Historic Places Can Transform America's Cities, authored by Ken Bernstein, who oversees Los Angeles' Office of Historic Resources, tells this under-appreciated L.A. story: how historic preservation has been transforming neighborhoods, creating a Downtown renaissance, and guiding the future of the city.

While it is younger than many East Coast cities, Los Angeles has a remarkable collection of architectural resources in all styles, reflecting the legacy of notable architects from the past 150 years. As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is also breaking new ground in its approach to historic preservation, extending beyond the preservation of significant architecture, to also identify and protect the places of social and cultural meaning to all of Los Angeles's communities. Preserving Los Angeles illuminates a Los Angeles that will surprise even longtime Angelenos--highlighting dozens of lesser-known buildings, neighborhoods, and places in every corner of the city that have been found by SurveyLA, the first-ever city-wide survey of Los Angeles' historic resources. The text is richly illustrated through images by a prominent architectural photographer, Stephen Schafer. Preserving Los Angeles is an authoritative chronicle of Los Angeles' urban transformation-- and a useful guide for citizens and urban practitioners nationally seeking to draw lessons for their own cities.

Discover insider secrets of how America's transportation system is designed, funded, and built - and how to make it work for your community

In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, renowned speaker and author of Strong Towns Charles L. Marohn Jr. delivers an accessible and engaging exploration of America's transportation system, laying bare the reasons why it no longer works as it once did, and how to modernize transportation to better serve local communities.

You'll discover real-world examples of poor design choices and how those choices have dramatic and tragic effects on the lives of the people who use them. You'll also find case studies and examples of design improvements that have revitalized communities and improved safety.

This important book shows you:

• The values of the transportation professions, how they are applied in the design process, and how those priorities differ from those of the public.
• How the standard approach to transportation ensures the maximum amount of traffic congestion possible is created each day, and how to fight that congestion on a budget.
• Bottom-up techniques for spending less and getting higher returns on transportation projects, all while improving quality of life for residents.

Housing is more than bricks and mortar. The home is where our hopes and dreams play out, and it lies at the heart of our lives. This is where we rest, eat, and relax. The home we enjoy can determine our health, life expectancy, and day-to-day well-being. In contrast, the lack of a stable residence can lead to mental and physical illness and often premature death. This is central to how we conceive of a good and dignified life.

Feeling at Home grapples with the practical and emotional questions of housing - domestic labour, privacy, security, ownership, and health. Is it possible to imagine success without home ownership? Alva Gotby makes clear that solving the housing crisis is about much more than housing stock. It is about revolutionising our everyday lives and labours.

A richly detailed and lively account of a community victory against an unscrupulous real estate mogul...the author works the minor miracle of turning largely procedural real estate wrangling into gripping reading. - Kirkus Reviews

Robinson's upbeat and detailed account is less about the future president and more about community organizing and what it takes to put together an effective plan of civic-minded action. Moreover, it is about fundraising, development, and the ongoing fight over what New York City should be, with a welcome emphasis on navigating its corridors of power...it is also clear and firsthand, as he was in the thick of this battle from the start, writing with erudition and authority. - BookLIfe Reviews

In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his masterpiece, a half-mile of gargantuan buildings overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan's West Side. After five years of community organizing and strategic opposition, they defeated his proposal.

The victorious civic groups had a radically different vision for the site - one that was suited to the community, environmentally sound, and financially feasible. Seeking a way forward, Trump quickly endorsed their concept. The civic groups then worked with him to finalize the design. The resulting Riverside South Master Plan achieved substantial public benefits on privately owned land. Within eighteen months of the city's approval, Trump sold the property.

As told by one of the key participants in this conflict, Turf War goes beyond the national headlines to reveal the personalities, politics, and economics that altered the development of this major waterfront property.

These Manhattan activists were attached to their turf and were willing to fight for it. Cities and towns across America are facing similar assaults by developers who have little regard for the impact of their ambitions on the character of communities. There are lessons to be learned here.

FINALIST, 2025 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE

InsideHook: The 10 Books You Should Be Reading This November

A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery

In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would have sliced across SoHo and Little Italy, demolishing historic build-ings, and displacing thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York had spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars.

Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway: Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York's uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York's transit system?

A well respected urban writer who has focused on New York's transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro's landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID- 19 pandemic, New York's re-embracement of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg's push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates' protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to how New York's stewardship of its streets and subways have played a critical role during the 2020 pandemic and subsequent recovery.

Introducing a cast of transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell) and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York's anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global city: not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.

This Very Short Introduction is organized around eight key aspects of city planning: street layout; congestion and decentralization; the response to suburbanization; the conservation and regeneration of older districts; cities as natural systems; cities and regions; social class and ethnicity; and disasters and resilience. The underlying assumption throughout is that decisions that we make today about cities and metropolitan regions are best understood as the continuation of past efforts to solve fundamental problems that have shifted and evolved over multiple generations. At its best, city planning utilizes technical tools to achieve goals set by community action and political debate. Carl Abbott's addition to Oxford's long-running Very Short Introduction series is a brief but concentrated look at past decisions about the management of urban growth and their effects on the creation of the twenty-first century city.

ABOUT THE SERIES:
The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Left Coast visitors to California, beware. When making your next trip, be sure to carry water (but not in a plastic bottle), bring plenty of batteries to keep the lights on (thanks to forecast blackouts from renewable energy mandates), and stay away from bureaucrats who want to ban practically all you have and tax your money away.

Policymakers have transformed California from a land of opportunity and prosperity for all into a real-life horror film where freedom and liberty is being choked by state government. Politicians including California's Kamala Harris are being inspired by what Gov. Gavin Newsom calls The California Way to promote these bad ideas from coast to coast.

The California Left Coast Survivor's Guide from the Pacific Research Institute gives readers the facts and knowhow needed to stop California ideology from taking root nationwide. Inspired by the handbooks that have prepared eager adventurers for years, the book provides lessons on how to survive the progressive wilderness creeping in from California. Readers will learn how to avoid Left Coast mistakes in their states and instead follow the path to prosperity through lower taxes, entrepreneurship, less government red tape, and greater opportunity for all.

National bestselling author of APOCALYPSE NEVER skewers progressives for the mishandling of America's faltering cities.

Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse.

Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison. But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem.

What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies. San Francisco and other West Coast cities -- Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland -- had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing, and crime to actively enabling them.

San Fransicko reveals that the underlying problem isn't a lack of housing or money for social programs. The real problem is an ideology that designates some people, by identity or experience, as victims entitled to destructive behaviors. The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.

Over the past ten years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise introduction to smart cities, presenting key concepts, definitions, examples, and historical contexts, along with discussions of both the drawbacks and the benefits of this approach to urban life.

After reviewing current terminology and justifications employed by technology designers, journalists, and researchers, the book describes three models for smart city development--smart-from-the-start cities, retrofitted cities, and social cities--and offers examples of each. It covers technologies and methods, including sensors, public wi-fi, big data, and smartphone apps, and discusses how developers conceive of interactions among the built environment, technological and urban infrastructures, citizens, and citizen engagement. Throughout, the author--who has studied smart cities around the world--argues that smart city developers should work more closely with local communities, recognizing their preexisting relationship to urban place and realizing the limits of technological fixes. Smartness is a means to an end: improving the quality of urban life.

A richly detailed and lively account of a community victory against an unscrupulous real estate mogul...the author works the minor miracle of turning largely procedural real estate wrangling into gripping reading. - Kirkus Reviews

Robinson's upbeat and detailed account is less about the future president and more about community organizing and what it takes to put together an effective plan of civic-minded action. Moreover, it is about fundraising, development, and the ongoing fight over what New York City should be, with a welcome emphasis on navigating its corridors of power...it is also clear and firsthand, as he was in the thick of this battle from the start, writing with erudition and authority. - BookLIfe Reviews

In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his masterpiece, a half-mile of gargantuan buildings overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan's West Side. After five years of community organizing and strategic opposition, they defeated his proposal.

The victorious civic groups had a radically different vision for the site - one that was suited to the community, environmentally sound, and financially feasible. Seeking a way forward, Trump quickly endorsed their concept. The civic groups then worked with him to finalize the design. The resulting Riverside South Master Plan achieved substantial public benefits on privately owned land. Within eighteen months of the city's approval, Trump sold the property.

As told by one of the key participants in this conflict, Turf War goes beyond the national headlines to reveal the personalities, politics, and economics that altered the development of this major waterfront property.

These Manhattan activists were attached to their turf and were willing to fight for it. Cities and towns across America are facing similar assaults by developers who have little regard for the impact of their ambitions on the character of communities. There are lessons to be learned here.

The author presents a behind the scenes look at the secretive international policies of the British government and how their successes allowed them to rise to the top of a vast secret order of World Finance. According to the author, he has pieced enough information together, presented in this book, which clearly shows that a colossal financial and political organization is run from a area of London called The City. Due to its power, The City is claimed to operate as a super-government of the world, and plays some kind of role or has influence in virtually every major world event.