Top Urban Planning Books

The Annual Planetizen Top Books List features the top 10 best urban planning books published in the previous year. The Planetizen 20 features the all-time top 20 planning books that every planner should read. The titles are decided by Planetizen editors based on suggestions by professionals, academics, book reviews, and other criteria.

We welcome your nominations. Please review our selection criteria. If you are a publisher, we welcome a review copy. Planetizen has partnered with Amazon.com to enable you to easily purchase any of these titles. The proceeds from books ordered through the Planetizen Book Lists help to maintain Planetizen.

If you have questions about our Top Books, or wish to nominate a book, please send us an email.

2025 Top Books

• American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest by Kyle Paoletta
• The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal
• Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
• Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman
• Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers by Paulina Rowińska
• Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum
• Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus
• Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam Bloch
• The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution by Benjamin Schneider
• Artificial Intelligence for Urban Planning by Thomas W. Sanchez
• Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield
• Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America by Will Bardenwerper
• Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World - and How We Can Take It Back by Chris Berdik

Check out the full post for more details on each title.

2024 Top Books

• Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life by Joe William Trotter, Jr.
• Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World by Sara Bronin
• A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing by Max Podemski
• Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos by Audrea Lim
• On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America by Abrahm Lustgarten
• The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play by Frank Andre Guridy
• Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in NYC by Ross Perlin
• Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been by Jake Berman
• Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City by Alex Hannaford
• Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives by Jarrett Walker
• Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System by Wes Marshall
• Shrink The City: The 15-Minute Urban Experiment and the Cities of the Future by Natalie Whittle

Check out the full post for more details on each title.

2023 Top Books

Here’s a quick list of our picks for the best planning books published in 2023, but you can read more about why we chose them in the full post.

• How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flybjerg and Dan Golden
• Portal: San Francisco's Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities by John King
• Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
• Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar
• Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb
• Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City by Ben Wilson
• Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering by Lynn Peterson and Elizabeth Doerr
• Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth by Alan Mallach
• The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Biddle
• A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
• The First City on Mars: An Urban Planner’s Guide to Settling the Red Planet by Justin Hollander

2022 Top Books

• American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life by Richard K. Rein
• Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray
• Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System by Jenny Schuetz
• Gentrifier: A Memoir by Anne Elizabeth Moore
• Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
• A People’s Guide to Orange County by Elaine Lewinnek, Gustavo Arellano, and Thuy Vo Dang
• The Quarantine Atlas: Mapping Global Life Under COVID-19 by Laura Bliss
• Dream Play Build: Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places by James Rojas and John Kamp
• From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities by Alison Sant 
• Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Cities We Need by Johanna Hoffman
• Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy by Josh O’Kane 
• Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias by John Lorinc 
• Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx
• The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy by Sharon Zukin,

 Check out the full post for more details on each title.

2021 Top Books

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town by Charles Marohn
• Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America by Gene Slater
• Hip Hop Architecture by Sekou Cooke
• The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York by Mariana Mogilevuch
• Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester
• Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention by Ben Wilson
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Preserving Los Angeles by Ken Bernstein
• Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West by Ryanne Pilgeram
• New Mobilities: Smart Planning for Emerging Transportation Technologies by Todd Litman

Read our thoughts on these titles in the full post. For additional years, check out the links below. 

Want a full reading plan for urbanists? Be sure to also check out our list of the Top 20 Urban Planning Books (Of All Time).