Planetizen Newswire
Keep up with essential planning news and commentary, delivered to your inbox every Monday and Thursday.
Books
Richard Peiser and Ann Forsyth discuss their latest book, New Towns for the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to Planned Communities Worldwide, with the Penn Institute for Urban Research.
Penn IUR Urban Link
Feature
Simon Winchester's new book, Land, brings global scope to the concepts of land use.
Feature
The public health crisis of the coronavirus pandemic upended all the normal day-today routines this year. At least there are plenty of great urban planning books to read.
A new book created by the Sonoran Institute explains how exploratory scenario planning can be useful to prepare for the uncertainty of water in the near- and long-term future.
Sonoran Institute
Feature
An excerpt from a new book by Josh Stephens, "The Urban Mystique: Notes on California, Los Angeles, and Beyond," published by Solimar Books.
Feature
An excerpt from the new book by Shane Phillips, "The Affordable City," published by Island Press.
Andre M. Perry’s "Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities" reveals the web of historical and contemporary socioeconomic barriers that maintain the racial wealth divide.
Shelterforce Magazine
Blog post
In Right of Way, Angie Schmitt explains why U.S. pedestrian fatalities have increased in recent years.
Angie Schmitt, former editor at Streetsblog USA, has written a new book about pedestrian fatalities, which works to dispel some of the myths about traffic safety in the United States.
Curbed
Declining rents won't be a silver lining in the post-pandemic housing crisis.
Citymetric
There is finally a guidebook for one of the country's largest city parks. Learn more about it in this L.A. Times review.
Los Angeles Times
Feature
Dan Parolek, inventor of the term Missing Middle Housing, has written a new book on the subject, available now from Island Press. The following excerpts offer insight into overcoming planning and regulatory barriers to deliver the desired housing.
Blog post
A new book explains why people object to new housing in their neighborhoods, and whether these "neighborhood defenders" are representative of the public as a whole.
Feature
The 10th anniversary of "Cities for People" offers the occasion for this interview with Jan Gehl, who has devoted a 60-year career to ideas about humanistic city planning—ideas of increasing relevance in 2020.
In “Redlined: A Novel of Boston” by Richard W. Wise, an organizer's murder in 1970s Jamaica Plain exposes an epic battle over the future of American cities.
Shelterforce Magazine
The Houston story gets a new telling in a recently published book by Stephen Klineberg.
Texas Monthly
Feature
Software and other fields have made brilliant progress with the pattern language methodology, while built environment fields lag badly, mired in parochial debates over the massive book that invented the methodology.
Blog post
In "A History of Street Networks," Lawrence Aurbach discusses the intellectual movements driving the growth of suburban-style street design.
A book review of a book published this year with the title, "The Art of Classic Planning: Building Beautiful and Enduring Communities," offers stinging criticism of the past and present of planning.
The American Conservative
Feature
Managing development at the scale of megaregions is possible. An excerpt from the recently published book, "Designing for the Megaregion: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale," written by Jonathan Barnett, explains how.
