Reigniting the city-building revolution

This review is part of a special collaboration between Planetizen and Booked on Planning, a biweekly podcast where AICP planner Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt chat with authors of the latest books shaping urban planning today. 

Listen to the episode with today’s author in the player below, and check out their virtual Book Summit, happening in October. 

A wealth of literature has been published in recent years on housing, transportation, and urban design with entire books dedicated to a specific subset of the topic. Books such as Michael Eliason’s “Building for People” on eco districts, Nolan Gray’s “Arbitrary Lines” about ridding cities of zoning codes, Wes Marshall’s “Killed by a Traffic Engineer” on the harms caused by traffic manuals and many more help us understand the nuances and details of the built world. All of these ideas and more are brought together in Benjamin Schneider’s “The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution.”

The term "city-building" evokes ideas of western settlement in the pioneer days, the massive rebuilding efforts of the urban renewal era, or even suburban expansion, although the latter is less "city-building," save a few more holistic developments of the new urbanist variety. Schneider’s premise is that city-building drove these past eras of American history, but highlights “how profoundly absent it is from our own.” But the book doesn’t just harp on the lack of city-building efforts today. Instead, it highlights how we can do better and learn from cities that are moving in the right direction, many from outside the U.S.

Canadian cities, for example, are leading the way in transit development that provides reliable, fast service without the staggering price tag that accompanies nearly all US rail projects. These types of projects lead to the “sense in Vancouver that the project of city-building never ended.” Meanwhile many US cities are struggling to avoid the transit death spiral that has become more challenging since the pandemic. Social housing projects are starting to make their way over from European countries to states like Hawaii that are struggling to provide affordable housing. Building more districts in the German baugruppen urban cohousing style creates more livable, walkable communities, but to do so our building codes need to modernize.

Key to catching up to other countries in these efforts, according to Schneider, is a more active, rather than reactive government role in urban development. This may have some readers questioning the approach given what we know about the urban renewal days of heavy government involvement in urban development. But his approach differs by charging the government to lead coordination, consensus building and funding at a scale only the government can facilitate. In our current climate, this is more likely facilitated by cities that can “be laboratories that pilot the larger-scale changes that will ultimately be necessary to solve the nation’s biggest urban problems.”

“The Unfinished Metropolis” is the perfect read for a generalist planner who wants to know a little bit about a lot of topics. It’s also a great read to start someone down the path to more discovering in targeted topic books like mentioned above. Schneider combines historic trends and development eras to show where we’ve come from alongside examples of modern day efforts to revive our city-building mentality. It provides motivation to return to our roots of growth and improvement without falling prey to the harmful way past eras built.