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.
There is also a range of publications and statistics on cities from the UN and the European Union.
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 in this web site 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.
See also the Cites Programme at the London School of Economics. LSE Cities "studies how people and cities interact..." It provides a vast range of articles, reports, conference proceedings and books on nearly every aspect of the city.
Cities
***London, the unique city, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Penguin Books, London 1960. The best book written on London and not dated
***The City in History, Lewis Mumford, New York 1961. Once regarded as the standard work.
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. A legendary book, influential.
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. A great book, all you need to know about Baron Haussmann and what (and why) he did to Paris.
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. A standard work and one of the very best general guides to the city and urban living.
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 Flâneur - a collection of essays edited by Keith Tester, Routledge, London 1994.
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
***L'Assassinat de Paris, Louis Chevalier, Editions Ivrea, Paris 1997 (publié pour la première fois en 1970. Translated as The Assassination of Paris, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Les ravages du Paris de Queneau, de Cartier-Bresson, de Gréco, le meutre des Halles, l'autoroute au bord de la Seine...Un cri de coeur. A lire.
Postmetroplis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Edward Soja, Blackwell, Oxford 2000
***Cities in Civilisation, Peter Hall, Weidenfeld, London 1998. Another standard work, vast.
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. A short masterpiece.
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
L'Invention de Paris, Eric Hazan, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2012. Hazan - un nouveau Balzac
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. Justifiably polemic.
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 greatest cities nurture and stimulate ideas in science and the arts that are the very heart of human civilisation. For this reason, sustainable, humane and well-governed cities are our best hope for the future."
City, Street and Citizen: the measure of the ordinary, Suzanne Hall, Routledge, London 2012. "How can we learn from a multicultural society if we don’t know how to recognise it? The contemporary city is more than ever a space for the intense convergence of diverse individuals who shift in and out of its urban terrains. The city street is perhaps the most prosaic of the city’s public parts, allowing us a view of the very ordinary practices of life and livelihoods."
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. Anything by Walter Benjamin is worth reading.
La Ville, Max Weber, Les Belles Lettres, Paris 2013
Cities by Design: the social life of urban form, Fran Tonkiss, Polity Cambridge UK 2013
L'Atlas des Villes, Le Monde Hors-Serie, Le Monde Paris 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). One of the great biographies of a city planner with rather different ideas on cities than those of Jane Jacobs.
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.
Une traversée de Paris, Eric Hazan, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 2016
Le grand historien de Paris de nos jours.
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
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, Tokyo, Venice and London, Lauren Elkin, Chatto & Windus, London 2017
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?"
Shaping Portland: Anatomy of a Healthy City, Paddy Tillet, Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York & London 2017
The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City, Suzanne Hall, Ricky Burdett eds., SAGE, London 2017
..."focuses on the dynamics and disruptions of the contemporary city in relation to capricious processes of global urbanisation, mutation and resistance."
Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism, Cassim Shepard, The Monacelli Press, New York 2017
"Who makes our cities? Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism sheds light on the under-reported individuals who work, quietly and tirelessly, to make cities into the proving grounds of a more equitable and sustainable future, a future that advances ideals of solidarity and resilience."
Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded.Mustafa Dikeç, Yale University Press 2017 "A timely and incisive examination of contemporary urban unrest that explains why riots will continue until citizens are equally treated and politically included. Increasingly recognized as an expert on urban unrest, Dikeç examines urban revolts in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey... Mustafa Dikeç is professor of urban studies at the Université Paris-Est and Malmö University. He is the author of Badlands of the Republic and Space, Politics and Aesthetics. He lives in both Paris and Malmö."
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, Ashley Dawson, Verso, London and New York 2017
The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. paperback edition July 2017
" Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows."
The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequality and What We Can Do About It, Richard Florida, Oneworld September 2017
***Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Richard Sennett, Allen Lane, London 2018 "...a sharp engaging study of urban environments and the people they are built for..." Drawing on a lifetime's work it ranges from London, Paris and Barcelona to Shanghai, Mumbai and Medellin and just about everywhere else. The range is extraordinary. It also reads like a work of literature.
The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta, Kushanava Choudhury, Bloomsbury, London 2018
Berlin, Jason Lutes, United Kingdom, September 2018
A comic book, or graphic novel: " the unspoken hero of Berlin is the city itself in all its fractured and disordered glory."
Sao Paulo: Uma Biografia Grafica. A Graphic Biography, Felipe Correa, bilingual edition, University of Texas 2018
Shaping Cities in the Urban Age, Ricky Burdett, Philip Rhode, Phaidon, London 2018
“Shaping cities in the XXIth century is an unprecedented challenge in terms of ecological, social and economic policies. This book is a major contribution to the urban debate and brings together the most accurate expertise around the world. As the Mayor of Paris, I know how much sharing our experience with other local leaders is crucial for our common development.” Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris and Chair of the C40.
Imaginative Communities, Admired Cities, Regions and Countries, Robert Govers, Reputo Press, Antwerp 2018
The Monocle Guide to Building Better Cities, Andrew Tuck ed., Gestalten, Berlin 2018
Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. 2019
"We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines."
London Made Us: A Memoir of a Shape-Shifting City, Robert Elms, Canongate, London 2019
Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson, Verso, London and New York 2019
Urban life in the age of climate change
The April 2019 edition of the National Geographic is given over to cities. It contains an article by Jared Diamond on What we Gain or lose in Cities."Urban life involves trade-offs. We may gain big benefits in return for suffering big disadvantages."
Cities: The First 6,000 years, Monica L Smith, Random House Penguin April 2019
“This is a must-read book for any city dweller with a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and why we’re so attracted to them.”–Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Ancient Egypt
Islamic Empires:Fifteen Cities that define a civilisation, Justin Marozzi, Alan Lane London 2019
Growth: From Micro Organisms to Megacities, Vaclav Smil, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. 2019
Why humanity's endless expansion must stop.
Migrant City: A new History of London, Panikos Panayi, Yale University Press, New Haven 2020
Cities: The first 6,000 years, Monica L. Smith, Viking, New York 2020
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott, Yale University Press, New Haven 2020
A review of the two books above can be found in The First Mean Streets by Tim Flannery in the March 14 2020 edition of the New York Review of Books, Vol. LXVII, Number 4.
Journals
Informationen zur Modernen Stadtgeschichte
Mesto a dejiny = The city and history
Urban History Review/Revue d’histoire urbaine
See also various associations, university departments and research groups:
Based at the London School of Economics the Cities Programme is an international centre about the understanding of contemporary urban society. Its and research and publications on cities and urban living across the world are among the best in the field.
The European Association of Urban History
Urban History Group at the University of Leicester, England
Cities in conflict and the destruction of heritage
Three essential works among very many:
Palmyre: L'irreplaçable Trésor, Paul Veyne, Albin Michel 2016
***The Destruction of Memory, Architecture at War, Robert Bevan, Reaktion Books London, second expanded edition reprinted 2019
"Attacks on Nimrud and Palmyra, the cracked domes of mosques from Iraq to Bosnia...This important book...searches through history to highlight a range of conflicts in which the destruction of architecture has been pivotal...From Cortez's razing of Aztec cities to the devastation of Warsaw and Dresden in the Second World War, and the cultural and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia..." A standard work.
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
This list is not by any means definitive and does not cover all the various conference, seminar and workshop proceedings on city museums over many years.
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. It is now the standard guide.
