 | City: Rediscovering the Center by William H. Whyte
Buy used from: $1.92 Wonderfully detailed observations about how people actually use and interact in public spaces. Whyte has a wonderful way with words, every page provides you within an intersting tidbit of knowledge.
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 | Camillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning: With a translation of the 1889 Austrian edition of his City Planning According to Artistic Principles (Dover Books on Architecture) by Christiane Crasemann Collins
Buy new: $15.14 / Used from: $13.50 Just came back into print! So get it while you can. Sitte was interested in creating "outdoor rooms" rather than scaleless places we have today. His figure/ground illustrations are very useful.
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 | Great Streets by Allan B. Jacobs
Buy new: $27.72 / Used from: $23.75 The great line drawings are beautiful and illustrate pertinent details better than any photo could. Great reference for comparing the world's great streets and grids of major cities all on same scale.
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 | City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, Revised Edition by David Sucher
Buy new: $23.95 / Used from: $10.70 Small, fun book. A bunch of small ideas, and a few bigger ones, on how to make a city more user-friendly and inviting.
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 | The Regional City by Peter Calthorpe
Buy new: $44.95 / Used from: $11.55 The regional scale is the only way to effectively lessen sprawl and create a cohesive metropolitan area. Integrates well with Calthorpe's previous writings on smaller scale new urbanism.
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 | The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community by Peter Katz
Buy new: $37.77 / Used from: $17.00 Plenty of full-color photos of the first of the 'new urbanist' communities and good descriptions.
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 | How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall
Buy new: $17.79 / Used from: $6.25 A realistic look at forces that are shaping today's cities. From the point of view of a journalist and not an urban planner, so has few of a planner's biases.
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 | Patterns of Home: The Ten Essentials of Enduring Design by Max Jacobson
Buy used from: $8.50 Strictly architecture, but a book of overlooked commonsense and good ideas by students of Christopher Alexander
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| World of Suzie Wong by Richard Mason
Absolutely Nothing to do with urban planning. The 'Memoirs of a Geisha' of the sixties.
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 | The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (The 'Good Parts' Version) by William Goldman
Buy used from: $25.48 Same as above. The only book I have wanted to read AFTER seeing the movie--and it is better than the great movie.
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