When I wrote about the book Crossings at the end of January, I said, “the book could have been greatly expanded to talk about how the growth of road networks in our cities over the past century have transformed our cities and society.” City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequity, and the Future of America’s Highways by Megan Kimble is the follow on to Crossings that I was looking for. City Limits focuses on highway development and opposition in Houston, Dallas, and Austin. While all three of these cities are obviously in Texas, their stories are diverse enough that they can be instructive for cities outside of the Lone Star State as well.

Much of the first part of the book talks about the social ills of ever-expanding highways. This feels like old information for folks who have been interested in cities for a while, but for people just being introduced to the freeway fight this is useful background and history. This first part of the book also introduces us to many of the personal stories that will carry us throughout the book as various aspects of highway widening and the first against them are explored.

These personal stories are really the focus of the book. Sharing the lived experiences of the people in the path of highway widening is the heart of this book. These stories illustrate the real human impact of highway widening projects. In fact, these stories are such a focus that we often miss the wider perspective and data that can be useful in opposing wider freeways elsewhere.

As the book progresses, it starts tracking the current fight against proposed future highway expansion in these three Texas cities. The book looks at the various ways groups have opposed freeways at every level of government. Unfortunately, the book clearly demonstrates how many of these fights may delay wider freeways, but rarely stops them.

One bit of hope is the explanation of how highways are funded and how it compares to other transportation infrastructure projects. Simply stated, the Federal government picks up a much larger portion of the cost of highway construction than other transit projects. This implies that there is a clear lever to pull to drive a re-prioritization of transit projects by state Departments of Transportation and local transit agencies.

Unfortunately, City Limits only focuses on the harm of cutting highways through cities. It does not talk about the other harms caused by car dependency in our cities. There is no mention of how car dependency harms local business or how wide fast roads dictate every other aspect of our built environment. While the book does talk about how highways divide communities, it does not address the more insidious ways car dependency isolates us.

Overall, City Limits is a good continuation of the conversation started this year with Crossings. I’m looking forward to it continuing with Killed by a Traffic Engineer next month and the War on Cars book sometime in the near future. Hopefully, at least the War on Cars book, will take a 40,000 foot view of car dependency and really round out the conversation.

For the past decade, Human Transit by Jarrett Walker has been the preeminent book for non-transit planners to understand transit planning. A revised edition of the book was released earlier this year which incorporates an additional decade of experience Jarrett has obtained as a practicing transit planner. Overall, Human Transit is the best example that I’ve found of books by consultants that walk the tightrope between advocacy and execution.

Overall, Jarrett’s framework for thinking about transit is that access is the key metric that transit agencies should be paying attention to. He defines access as “the freedom to do anything that requires leaving the home.” This focus on access, and the chapter dedicated to it, is new in the revised edition. While the rest of the book has not been substantially changed, this lens of access changes the understanding of the rest of the book even if the words did not change. It provides this idea that when designed and evaluating different transit options, transit agencies should be looking at how many people will have access to jobs and school and shopping and anything else that will take them out of the house via transit versus other modes of transportation. This is a significantly different way of evaluating transit than that which was presented in the first edition.

As part of this evaluation, Jarrett identifies seven demands that people have if they are to use the transit system:

1. It takes me where I want to go.

2. It takes me when I want to go.

3. It is a good use of my time.

4. It is a good use of my money.

5. It respects me in the level of safety, comfort, and amenity it provides.

6. I can trust it.

7. It allows me spontaneously to change my plans.

In essence, these are the levers transit agencies can pull to affect the amount of access transit users have, and in turn the ridership of the transit system.

Having this type of framework is critical as our cities continue to grow and densify. Southern California especially has grown with cars as the primary, and often only, way of getting around. As is heard in nearly every community meeting across the southland, as we grow, we’re pushing up against the geometric limit of car dependency. Parking and traffic are constant issues that we face, and that’s simply because every car takes up 200 square feet of land everywhere it goes. The only way to continue ensuring people have access to jobs and services is by growing the transit network.

Human Transit is a vital book that will provide any city builder with the needed framework to discuss and understand transit options as our cities grow. In fact, Human Transit has something for all consultants, not just city builders. The introduction of the book includes a two-page section entitled “Listen to Your Plumber: Values Versus Expertise.” These two pages should be required reading for every consultant, regardless of industry. This is written in the context of transit planning, but it’s broadly applicable. The basic premise is that consultants can provide expertise, but that they must rely upon their clients to provide the values that will guide any given project. One primary role of any consultant is to ask the right questions to reveal what those values are.

This new edition of Human Transit should sit on everyone’s shelf right alongside Walkable City and Building the Cycling City. These three books provide the framework necessary for transitioning cities away from car dependency and towards greater access in growing cities.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar is a more accessible and entertaining version of Donald Shoup’s classic tome The High Cost of Free Parking. Paved Paradise cover the problem with giving our cities over to parking, why we did it in the first place, and how cities are working to reverse the tide of parking overtaking our cities. However, by focusing entirely on parking, it doesn’t address the many other ways cars are given preference in our cities and the need cars fill in our lives.

As I’ve written about before, parking is not the only, or even the first, problem we should be focusing on in our transportation system. Paved Paradise, like most any book that look at urban transit through the lens of parking, presents parking reform as the primary policy change to reform the way our cities work. Unfortunately, the reality is not that simple.

Paved Paradise provides a detailed history of how American abandoned its urban transit systems in favor of the car, and then adapted its cities to make way for the ever increasing number of cars. This, in turn, make walking and use the remaining transit more difficult, furthering their decline. In other words, cars replaced other modes of transportation, they did not reduce the amount that people traveled (in fact, they did the opposite.)

The main argument for the elimination of parking spaces is that it will reduce driving. As Grabar argues in chapter 5 of Paved Paradise, “Control over the availability of parking spaces is a key policy instrument in reducing car trips.” But this completely misunderstands the history that hi spent four chapters laying out. Cars did not replace transit and walking in cities through minimizing transportation, cars simply became an easier form of getting around. We cannot move away from the car as our primary means of transportation on the assumption that people will travel less if it’s simply more difficult to park. Reductions in travel in this way would reduce people’s quality of life in very real ways. Instead, we need to provide transportation options that make getting around easier than using the car. We need transportation options that, just like the car had done, increase the amount people travel.

A great example of this is the examination of parking pricing in cities. The entire idea behind The High Cost of Free Parking is that cities should eliminate parking minimums and price parking so that it’s 80% full all of the time, and allow the free market to dictate how much parking is produced. Paved Paradise builds on this and provides examples of cities that have pursued this approach since the release of High Cost. What Paved Paradise shows is that cities that have priced parking have simply moved where cars are parked, often from the curb into lots or structures. Pricing parking appropriately does not eliminate the need to travel, or even the number of trips taken by car, it simply rearranges where the cars end up. That is not to say that pricing parking is bad policy, it still minimizes many of the negative externalities of parking, but it does not reduce driving.

In fact, there are many ways to reduce the impact on cars in cities that do not do much to reduce driving by themselves, but are an important step to enable alternative modes of transportation in the future. Designing communities using the principles of New Urbanism is a great way to reduce the impact of the car on the city. The primary difference between traditional urbanism and New Urbanism is that New Urbanism accommodates the car while hiding them from view and reducing their impact on the streetscape. This ensures walkable communities can be walkable, and provide an alterative to the car on the block scale. These walkable blocks can then be linked together using bike lanes and transit, ensuring transportation options that are as good as or better than the car.

Overall, the focus of Paved Paradise is misplaced. Parking is a symptom of a larger transportation system that needs to be reformed, and that cannot happen based on the idea that people will travel less. Even the book’s focus on cities is misplaced. In chapter 13, which was my favorite because it featured my friend Jose Trinidad Castaneda, the author states that our housing and climate crises will be solved in the suburbs. However, most of the book is focused on Manhattan (not even the rest of NYC), with a little Chicago and Los Angeles thrown in. If the housing and climate crises are going to be solved in the suburbs, how will parking reform in these places help when people’s only options to get around is by car? By focusing monomaniacally on parking, the author misses the broader question of how we can remake our car-dependent cities to move people around without a car.

Reading The Architecture of Community by Léon Krier, you really get a sense of his outsized influence on New Urbanism specifically and modern urban planning more generally. The Architecture of Community is a collection of essays and drawings by Léon Krier from throughout his career. While this leads to slightly disjointed reading, the essays are grouped into chapter by subject. The first and most robust chapter is on classical architecture and modernity. In fact, the first three chapters all have to do with Krier’s critique of modernity. These chapters are foundational to the rest of the book. The ideas presented here continually resurface throughout.

Unfortunately, the ideas presented in this first section are a real mixed bag. Some of the ideas make a lot of sense, such as the use of buildings – especially unique uses within a city – should be identifiable from the form of the building. However, other ideas seem misplaced or come from personal preference. These first few chapters spend most of the time decrying modernism and modern styles of architecture. Much of this comes from a point of view that the built environment of the past is better, based on the buildings that remain from the past. This ignores the fact that most buildings from the past have not survived to today, which is a common critique of people who advocate for the use of traditional building materials, styles, and practices. Overall, this section feels very much like old-man-yells-at-clouds, but that doesn’t mean the old man isn’t right every once in a while.

The most interesting and relevant section of the book for urban planners today comes about a third of the way in. The chapter titled The Polycentric City of Urban Communities. This chapter introduces many of the germs of ideas that have solidified into the current conversation around the 15-minute city. His definition of an “urban quarter” as an area of about 500-600 meters (1,600-1,900 feet), or a circle in which someone could walk within about 10 minutes, and meet all of their daily needs is very similar to how the 15-minute city is defined today, just about a third smaller. The essays in this chapter are their accompanying drawing help illustrate the historic roots, need, and desirability of having compact communities that meet resident’s needs.

Related to this idea, but not directed tied together in the book, is the idea of expansion of a city through duplication. While this focuses on a city’s initial growth (as urban planners and designers so often do), there are many lessons we can take while growing a city within its existing fabric. In essence, Léon identifies two ways cities often expand, through a horizontal separation of uses (i.e. suburbanization) or through the vertical separation of uses within ever increasingly tall buildings (which he describes as vertical cul-de-sacs). A third way of expanding cities, the one he advocates for, is the duplication of complete cities adjacent to the existing city. As planners today, focused on city building within the city’s existing fabric, we can use these ideas to work towards a series of interconnected complete communities within the city. To do this, we must bring missing uses into the monocultural expanses that are defined by our traditional Euclidean zoning. In other words, add homes to our retail and office centers, and add retail and offices to our residential subdivisions.

As the book goes on, it is filled with more and more drawing and photographs of Léon Krier’s work. While educational if you sit and study them, they are often presented without context or explanation. This feels like a waste of pages. It would have been great had Dhiru Thadani, as the person who conceived of this book and helped assemble it, provided his own words to help bring context and tie everything together into a cohesive whole.

In the end, The Architecture of Community feels like a collection of blog posts stitched together into the physical form of a book. While it is interesting to see the origins and source material for so many of the ideas that permeate new urbanism and modern planning, there are many other books that present these same ideas more cohesively and thought through than what’s in this book.

A City on Mars sounds like a futuristic urban planning book, but it’s not. The book is about the challenges humanity will have settling space, whether it’s on space stations, the Moon, or Mars. As a long-time space nerd and urban planner, this book had the potential to be an interesting exploration at the cross section of multiple interests. Unfortunately, the book falls into the same traps as others who envision what space colonies will be like, but in the other direction. Most space settlement advocates describe space as a potential human-made Eden. This book describes space settlements as a potential human-made hell. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but we can’t know because there are no detailed plans for any space settlements and we simply don’t know enough to make an accurate prediction on what space settlements could be like or the challenges in creating them.

The book starts with a look at what we know about the physical and mental impacts of spaceflight on humans. The truth is that we don’t know much, and what we do know isn’t exactly promising when it comes to the long-term settlement of space. The book then goes on to examine each of the likely places for space settlement, including the Moon, Mars, and space stations. In these sections, the authors discuss the reasons for settling each, and the challenges. The book then goes into a lengthy discussion about the current international legal framework for space exploration and settlement, including a whole chapter on create new nations in space. The final section of the book is about the risks space settlement poses to all of humanity, which might have been the most convincing part of the book, but the arguments still ended up falling fairly flat.

After all of this discussion, the authors propose a wait-and-go-big approach to space settlement. Their contention is that space settlement is risky (it is), and that the best way to mitigate those risks is to do as much research upfront as possible, and then send a large colony over a short period of time. The thinking is that a large colony has more resources in the form of humans, which will allow for more specialization of workers and therefore have a greater chance of success. Unfortunately, the authors seem to severely misunderstand the way both technology and the law are developed.

Technology, and law, are developed only through necessity. The law to safely govern space will not be created until an international crisis arises that requires that law. The necessary technology for space settlement will not be created until we try to colonize space and know what tech is needed. There are certainly many unknowns to space colonization, but the only way to identify and solve those unknowns is to attempt to colonize space. A wait-and-go-big approach will never allow us to solve those unknowns, so we will never be ready to colonize space.

Of course, one of the big drivers for entering space is economic growth. The book acknowledges that as a driver, but really questions what it’ll do for the economy on Earth. While this might be true, the promise of wealth was often the driver for exploration and settlement from Europe but it rarely paid off in the near term. However, over the long term, past waves of exploration and settlement allowed for significant economic growth. The problem with the authors’ point of view is that they’re focused solely on Earth’s economy. This is like looking at the colonization of the Americas through the lens of the European economy, while ignoring the American economy separate from Europe. Now here we are, 400 years later, with an economy that dwarfs Europe’s. There is no real consideration of the economic activity between future space colonies that don’t have Earth acting as the middleman.

In fact, many problems described in the book with growing the space economy involve getting things off Earth or back to Earth. Either we’re launching huge amounts of mass into space from Earth, or we’re delivering finished industrial products back to Earth. They don’t really consider using the industrial output of space for use in space. That way we don’t have to deal with the Earth’s gravity well once we’re out of it.

For example, they take on the argument that there are significant amounts of precious metals available for mining in space. The argument goes that returning these precious metals at the current prices for those metals will represent a great increase in wealth for humanity. As a counter-point to this, the authors use the commoditization of aluminum to show how the price of precious material goes down as the metal becomes more common. Basically, even though aluminum was once a precious metal, now that it’s available to everyone doesn’t make us all millionaires. However, think of how much better off our lives are because we have aluminum. In very real ways, the commoditization of aluminum hasn’t made us rich as a precious metal, but it has improved our quality of life. What else is wealth other than the ability to improve one’s quality of life. If extraction of space resources makes gold, platinum and other precious metals common commodities the way aluminum is today, there’s no telling how we might be able to use them to improve the quality of our lives. This won’t make us rich by increasing our bank accounts, but it will make us rich in more important ways.

In fact, the entire first chapter is the authors setting up a series of straw man arguments for why space settlement is a good thing, and then knocking them down. Unfortunately, they don’t spend any real time getting into the details of any of the reasons for space settlement or giving a good faith argument as to why space settlement could be beneficial.

Not only do the authors attempt to cast doubt on the reasons for colonizing space, they spend a significant portion of the book detailing the risks of colonization on the people that go to space. A lot of their concerns about these risks and the well-being of the folks moving to space, ring hollow. It is a personal decision on how much risk and discomfort a person is willing to tolerate. It might be more than the authors are willing to take on, but they can’t dictate what others can do. Throughout the book, the authors seem to come from the view that exploration and settlement are not worth the risk of suffering and death. While this may be true for them, it is hard to say that it will be true for everyone. The exploration and colonization of the world required similar risks and hardships, yet people still did it. It is unreasonable to think that the only way a space colony will be successful is if the length and quality of life for the colonists is the same as it would if those same people stayed on Earth.

The final chapter of the book attempts to make a list of unknowns that that need to be figured out before we can successfully settle space. They then go on to say that we need to continue to slowly enter space with longer duration space flights and research stations on the Moon and eventually Mars, before we begin a colonization effort. This final chapter felt discontinuous from the rest of the book where they detail all of the challenges and problems with colonizing space.

In the end, their recommendation is similar to how NASA pursued the early space program. In other words, create a list of unknowns that need to be figured out and then create a plan to systematically figure them out before we can colonize another planet. Just like with the Mercury, Gemini, and early Apollo programs, where NASA figured out everything the American space program needed to learn in order to successfully land on the moon. Whether that was how to do EVAs during Gemini 4, or how to rendezvous and dock to spacecraft on Gemini 6A/7, and Gemini 8.

At the end of this book, I agree with their conclusions, that to successfully settle space, we will need to identify these unknowns and figure out how to make them known. The only way to do this is by identifying what we can now, and to start chipping away at them, while knowing that there are things we don’t even know we don’t know yet. This will only happen as we enter space, start to have increasingly long lives in space, and slowing start filling the stars. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the main body of the book supports the authors’ own conclusions.

At the end of the introduction, the authors riff on a famous quote by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” They say that when humans emerge from the cradle, they are toddlers prone to self-harm and destruction. They go on to say that when humanity emerges from the Earth, it would be better if we did so as full-fledged adults. The problem is that if humans are kept in the cradle to adulthood, they never learn the necessary lessons to be adults. Humanity will no doubt make mistakes as it enters space, but it is through those mistakes that we will learn how to be a spacefaring civilization.

Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg is all about building social infrastructure and closer knit communities. As discussed in books like Happy City and This is Where You Belong, social connection is the key to living a happier, more fulfilling life. As Palaces for the People goes into, these social connections also provide greater community resilience in times of crisis and prosperity in times of plenty. In other words, social infrastructure is key to fulfilling the promise of the city to improve prosperity and happiness for residents.

As defined in Palaces for the People, social infrastructure is anything in the built environment that brings people together and allows them to form social bonds. The obvious and most talked about piece of social infrastructure – and what the book title references – is the library. While many public libraries are under funded and unable to provide their long-standing role in the community today, a properly functioning library is a place where communities can gather and get to know one another through library programs.

The book also spends a chapter talking about schools as social infrastructure. Schools can be a great place for parents to form new friendships and social bonds, but the schools must be conducive to these connections. Namely, schools must put parents in the same place at the same time, outside of their cars, for those connections to be made.

There are also other ways traditional hard infrastructure can become social infrastructure. Take for example river walks, which have become popular in American cities in recent years. Instead of just encasing a river flowing through a city in levies and berms, cities can use those spaces to provide a combination of flood protection and social gathering spaces.

However, not all social infrastructure is public. Non-profits, churches, and companies are all critical in providing social infrastructure as well. In expanding social infrastructure to these non-public places, Palaces for the People really builds off of books like The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg or Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Unfortunately, Palaces for the People doesn’t do much to extend those other works.

Palaces for the People falls short in three main ways. The book provides a series of snapshots of existing pieces of social infrastructure in various communities. However, the book does not tie any of these snapshots together to an overarching view of social infrastructure. The book feels like it’s missing a concluding chapter that ties everything together.

More importantly, the book is missing any sort of guidance on how to evaluate our own communities for social infrastructure gaps and how to develop new infrastructure to fill those gaps. Someone who picks up this book and realizes the deficiencies in their own community cannot then use this book to help them figure out how to correct those deficiencies. Undoubtedly, this was not intended as a how-to book, but at the end of the book readers are left feeling empty and wanting because they now better understand the holes in their community but might not have a clear path on how to fill those holes.

The final problem with the book is that it already feels dated even though it was just published in 2018. The book makes many references to the 2016 election between President Trump and Secretary Clinton. These references feel quaint given the recent history of the presidency. If a second, updated edition of this book is ever published, the book would become more timeless if these references were removed.

Overall, Palaces for the People is a good and interesting book, but by no means groundbreaking. If you’ve enjoyed The Great Good Place and Bowling Alone, but want a more modern take on the subject, pick this book up. Otherwise, you’re probably fine sticking with the classics.