Planetizen Releases Fifth Annual Top Books List

Planetizen

From a national land use manifesto, to a "compact history" of sprawl, a tour-de-force on free parking, and innovate analyses of the intersection of urban planning and gender, transportation, civil rights and bohemian culture, the fifth annual Planetizen Top 10 Books List, 2006 Edition, has it all.

We've got the big name authors -- former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, noted planning commentator Joel Kotkin, and Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program Director Bruce Katz -- as well as some lesser known but equally brilliant ones. UCLA professor Donald Shoup unpacks the perils of free parking; noted urbanist and author Ann Forsyth and landscape architect Laura Musacchio present an elegant manual for small park design; Columbia professor Susan Fainstein and New School professor Lisa Servon review 30 years of gender issues in planning; and professor Margaret Garb of Washington University in St. Louis uses turn-of-the-century Chicago as a case study for the birth of the American dream.

Covering a range of planning and development fields -- including transportation, land use, history, gender, housing, social justice, environmental design, race, and economic and community development -- this year's list represents the best literature planning had to offer in 2005.

You can read summaries of all ten books, plus a list of honorable mentions, here:

http://www.planetizen.com/books/2006/

Planetizen welcomes review copies of books published in 2006 for consideration for next year's Top 10 Books List, or for longer book reviews in the Planetizen Features section.