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Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
James Howard Kunstler · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWalkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
Jeff Speck · 316 pages
Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not wort
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck · 320 pages
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
Edward L. Glaeser · 404 pages
**A pioneering urban economist offers fascinating, even inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future.** America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they? As
Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises
Cameron Sinclair · 333 pages
"Edited by architecture for Humanity, a volunteer-based organization that provides architectural solutions to humanitarian crises, Design Like You Give a Damm brings the best of humanitarian design to the printed page. Proceeds from the sale of this book will support the work of Architecture for Humanity." --Cover.
Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change
Victor Papanek · 339 pages
The Image of the City
Kevin Lynch · 194 pages
What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion--imageability--and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
Christopher W. Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel · 1,171 pages
Alexander and his co-authors present us with over two hundred (roughly 250) "patterns" that they believe must be present in order for an environment to be pleasing, comfortable, or in their words, "alive." The patterns start at the most general level -- the first pattern, "Independent Regions," describes the ideal political entity, while another of my favorite patterns, "Mosaic of Subcultures," de
The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America
Mark Sundeen · 330 pages
The Unsettlers describes the search for the simple life through stories of diverse Americans living off the grid.
Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
Peter Geoffrey Hall · 632 pages
"Peter Hall's seminal Cities of Tomorrow remains an unrivalled account of the history of planning in theory and practice, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it. Now comprehensively revised, the fourth edition offers a perceptive, critical, and global history of urban planning and design throughout the twentieth-century and beyond. A revised and updat
Cities for People
Jan Gehl · 269 pages
Synopsis: For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use-or could use-the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable c
The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
David Harvey · 378 pages
Traces the development of the concept of postmodernism, explains its differences with modernism, and discusses political and social influences.
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
Simon Schama · 698 pages
This text explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Examines seventeenth-century Dutch life, history, and culture.
On Photography
Susan Sontag · 207 pages
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography, among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno · 192 pages
Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo
Margot Mifflin · 160 pages
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman · 412 pages
Discusses the ways in which the mass media are manipulated to present the news according to an underlying elite consenus which affects the manner in which similar events in different parts of the world are presented.
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
Peter Hessler · 438 pages
From the bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China.In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were t
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers
Alissa Quart · 227 pages
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 340 pages
A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, The Human condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then--diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox th
Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile
Taras Grescoe
"Taras Grescoe rides the rails all over the world and makes an elegant and impassioned case for the imminent end of car culture and the coming transportation revolution"I am proud to call myself a straphanger," writes Taras Grescoe. The perception of public transportation in America is often unflattering--a squalid last resort for those with one too many drunk-driving charges, too poor to afford i
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs · 458 pages
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. . . . [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society
Farhad Manjoo · 257 pages
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis · 462 pages