IN
Reading List
Publications on cities and city museums
The literature on cities and urban living is vast, and our list can never be definitive. New titles appear almost every day and we are keen to receive recommendations from our members and from visitors to our site. Most of our titles originate in Europe or North America and we would welcome publications from other regions of the world, where most people live and where there is the greatest growth of cities. We also welcome publications in languages other than English.
We have largely left out novelists, poets, musicians, and citizens, who perhaps get at the truth better. They need no introduction.
We also now have a section on cities in conflict and the destruction of heritage.
In contrast, the literature on museums about cities is inevitably limited (though growing), but in addition to our own publications, we list some of the more notable publications in the field and again we ask for recommendations to add to the list.
Cities
London, the unique city, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Penguin Books, London 1960
The City in History, Lewis Mumford, New York 1961
The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs, Vintage 1970
La Revolution Urbaine, Henri Lefebvre, Gallimard, Paris 1970
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs, Penguin Books, London 1972
Our CAMOC member, Chet Orloff introducing Jane Jacobs at Powell's bookshop Portland, Oregon
The Urban World, J. John Palen, McGraw-Hill, New York 1975
Paris: a Century of Change, 1878-1978, Norma Evenson, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1979
The History of the City, Leonardo Benevolo, English and Italian editions, MIT Press Massachusetts 1980
Cities and People, Mark Girouard, Yale University Press, New Haven 1985
Metropolis, Emrys Jones, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1990
The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Saskia Sassen, Princton University Pres, Princton 1991
The City Shaped, urban patterns and meanings throughout history, Spiro Kostoff, Thames and Hudson 1991
The Gaia Atlas of Cities, Gaia Books, Herbert Girardet, London 1992
The European Urban Charter, Standing Conference of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe, Council of Europe 1993
The European City (Making of Europe), Leonardo Benevolo, (trans. from the Italian by Carl Ipsen), Blackwell, Oxford 1995
City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn, William J Mitchell, MIT Press, Massachusetts 1995
Writings on Cities, Henri Lefebvre, Blackwell, Oxford 1995
Revitalising Historic Urban Quarters, Tim Heath, Steven Tiesdell, Taner Oc, Elsivier/Architectural Press 1996
Postmetroplis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Edward Soja, Blackwell, Oxford 2000
Cities in Civilisation, Peter Hall, Weidenfeld, London 1998
Urban Development and Civic Freedom, Michiel Wagenaar, (Stedebouw en Burgelijke Virjheid) , Toth, Amsterdam 1998
Creating Sustainable Cities, Herbert Girardet, Green Books, Dartington 1999
E –Topia: Urban Life, Jim – but not as we know it, William J Mitchell, MIT Press, Massachusetts 1999
Towards and Urban Renaissance, Urban Task Force, Department of Transport, Environment and the Regions, London 1999
The Slow Death of Great Cities? Urban Abandonment or Urban Renaissance, Anne Power, K Mumford, York Publishing Services-Joseph Rowntree Foundation 1999
Athènes: Urbanisme, Culture et Politique, Georges Prévélakis, L'Harmattan, Paris, Québec 2000
Cities for a Small Country, Anne Power, Richard Rogers, Faber and Faber, London 2000
The Seduction of Place: the History and Future of the City, Joseph Rykwert, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000
The Global City, Saskia Sassen, 2nd edition Princton University Press, Princton 2001
Cities: Re-imaging the Urban, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Polity Press, Cambridge 2002
Future Cities: The Copenhagen Lectures, H Thomsen ed., Fonden Realdania, Copenhagen 2002
ME++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William J Mitchell, MIT Press, Massachusetts 2003
Making Cities Work, G Hazell, Wiley-Academy 2003
The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre and Robert Bononno, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota 2003
London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Remaking of Inner London. Tim Butler and Garry Robson, Berg, London 2003
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, Richard Sennett, Penguin Books, London 2003
The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre, translated into English from the 1970 French original, University of Minnesota Press 2003
Intercultural City Reader, Phil Wood ed., Comedia, Stroud 2004
Riding the rapids: Urban Life in an Age of Complexity, Charles Landry, RIBA, London 2004
Cities People Planet, Herbert Girardet, Wiley, London 2004
Cities, John Reader, William Heinemann, London 2004
Urban Forms, The Death and Life of the Urban Block, Ivor Samuels, Philippe Panerai, Jean Castex and Jean Charles Depaule, Elsevier/Architectural Press 2004
Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City, Mark Crinson, Routledge, London 2005
Future City, Stephen Read, Jurgen Rosemann, Job van Eldijk, Routledge, London 2005
The Dictionary of Urbanism, Robert Cowan, Streetwise Press, Tisbury 2005
The Rise of the Ephemeral City, Joel Kotkin in Metropolis Magazine, 18 April 2005 www.metropolismag.com
The City, a Global History, Joel Kotkin, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 2005
Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance, Urban Task Force, London 2005
Planet of Slums, Mike Davies, Verso, London 2006
Ecopolis Now, Fred Pearce in New Scientist, London 17 June 2006
State of the World’s Cities 2006/7, UN-HABITAT (United Nations Human Settlements Programme), Nairobi 19 June 2006
Cities, Architecture and Society, Richard Burdett in The Architectural Review, London August 2006
The Art of City Making, Charles Landry, Earthscan 2006 www.earthscan.co
Cities, Environments and European History, the Journal of Urban History, special issue, Sage Publications, July 2007
The Endless City, The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic eds., Phaidon, London, New York 2008
New Urbanism and Beyond. Designing Cities for the Future, Tigran Haas, ed., Rizzoli, New York 2008
Naked City, the death and life of authentic urban places, Sharon Zukin, Oxford University Press 2010
Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser, Macmillan 2011
City: a guidebook for the urban age, P.D. Smith, Bloomsbury, London 2012
The Spirit of Cities: why the identity of a city matters in a global age, Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit, Princeton University Press 2013
All over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities, Michael Sorkin, Verso 2013
Paris, Capitale du XIXe Siècle, Walter Benjamin, Editions Allia, Paris 2013
La Ville, Max Weber, Les Belles Lettres, Paris 2013
Cities by Design: the social life of urban form, Fran Tonkiss, Polity Cambridge UK 2013
London: The Information Capital, James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, Particular Books/Penguin, London 2014
Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery, Penguin 2015
Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs, Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley, Island Press June 2015
The Power Brokers: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro, Bodley Head, London 2015 (first published in 1975)
The Language of Cities, Dayan Sudjic, Allen Lane, London 2016 : "Oversimplyfying a city means that you strip it of everything that makes it function as one..."
Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, Stephen Graham, Verso 2016
Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas that Shaped the World, Wade Graham, Amberley 2016
Mortal Cities, Forgotten Monuments, Arna Mačkić, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2016
She returns to Mostar and the bridge destroyed in the conflict. Much of the book is a reflection on the effects of war on cities.
Built on Bones: 15,000 years of Urban Life and Death, Brenna Hassett, Bloomsbury Press, London 2017.
"If cities are great, why are they full of things that kill us?"
Cities in conflict and the destruction of heritage
Palmyre: L'irreplaçable Trésor, Paul Veyne, Albin Michel 2016
The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Robert Bevan, Reaktion, second edition 2016
Ancient Syrian Cities: A Different Story of Destruction, Hugh Eakin in The New York Review of Books vol. LXIII, no. 14, September 29 - October 12 2016
Museums of Cities
Reflecting Cities: Proceedings of a Symposium, Nichola Johnson ed., Museum of London 1993
Discovering the City, Nichola Johnson; Museums about cities, Max Hebditch; Hidden history: the Peopling of London project, Nick Merriman; The artist as curator in a city museum, Carl Heideken; History, ideology and politics in the Historical Museum of Warsaw, Beata Meller; The imaginary city, Brigitte Scenczi; The city is the museum !, Anne-Marie Collins; Museums in Hungary: special privileges versus the community, Géza Buzinkay; Urban museology: an ideology for reconciliation, Amareswar Galla; editorial, Marcia Lord, all in Museum International no. 187 (edition covering city museums), UNESCO, Paris, 13 September 1995
Making City Histories in Museums, Gaynor Kavanagh and Elizabeth Frostick, Leicester University Press, Leicester 1998
Dream Spaces: memory and the museum, Gaynor Kavanagh, Leicester University Press, Leicester 2000
Comment inscrire les musées de ville dans la ville? International Association of Museums of History seminar, Museum of the History of Marseille, June 2003
The New Town Square: Museums and Communities in Transition, Robert R Archibald, Altamira Press, Walnut Creek 2004
Définir le musée de ville, Francine Marini-Ducray, La letter du comité national français d'ICOM, 30 December 2005
Musées de ville en France, Julie Guiyot-Corteville, La letter du comité national français d’ICOM, 30 December 2005
La fondation du musée de la ville de Berlin, Kurt Winkler, La letter du comité national français d’ICOM, 30 December 2005
Les musées régionaux berlinois dans le contexte de la ville, Udo Göswald, La letter du comité national français d’ICOM, 30 December 2005
City Museums as Centres of Civic Dialogue?
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the International Association of City Museums, Amsterdam, 3-5 November 2005, Renée Kistemaker ed., Amsterdam Historical Museum, Amsterdam 2006
Museum International no. 231, Urban Life and Museums, Isabelle Vinson ed., UNESCO Paris September 2006
City Portraits in City Museums, Marlen Mouliou ed. in En Volos, Volos September 2006
A definitive history and analysis of city museums by our colleague Jean-Louis Postula. Published 15 July 2015
Climate Change and the Future of Cities, Eric Klinenberg, ed., an issue of Public Culture (28:2), Duke University Press 2016
Global Undergrounds:Exploring Cities from Within, Paul Dobraszcyk, Carols Lopez Galvis, Bradley L. Garrett eds., Reaktion Books 2016
