Archive - Colin Marshall's Books on Cities

Tom Scocca, Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future (2011)

Long before publishing a celebrated piece on his health and professional crises this year, Tom Scocca was writing about China in the thick of the 2008…

Jul 8 •

June 2024

Jarrett Walker, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (2024)

A veteran public-transit consultant explains everything you really need to know about designing urban bus and train networks

Jun 9 •

May 2024

Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946)

A Depression-forged muckraker investigates how Los Angeles and its region came to represent America in extremis

May 7 •

February 2024

Tim Cocks, Lagos: Supernatural City (2022)

Can a non-Nigerian, much less an Englishman, hope to understand the "impossibility-ism" of Africa's star megacity?

Feb 21 •

January 2024

Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community…

The sociologist who popularized the idea of the "third place" finds what's gone missing from American life

Jan 27 •

December 2023

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023)

Why a pricey suburban college town is the dark heart of the American empire

Dec 31, 2023 •

October 2023

David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (2015)

Writers tend to obsess over Detroit's decline, but David Maraniss focuses instead on the city's last glory days in the early 1960s, the time of Motown…

Oct 9, 2023 •

September 2023

Georges Perec, Lieux (2022)

In 1969, Georges Perec launched himself into a twelve-year-long project to describe twelve meaningful places in Paris — a project that went unseen by…

Sep 2, 2023 •

June 2023

Kate Ascher, The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005)

A New York City insider's lavishly illustrated explanation of her city's urban infrastructure, in both its might and its decrepitude

Jun 27, 2023 •

March 2023

Robert Fouser, Exploring Cities with Robert Fouser (로버트 파우저의 도시 탐구기) (2019)

An American linguist-urbanist remembers the cities he's known, from Ann Arbor to Tokyo to Dublin to Seoul — and does so entirely in Korean

Mar 15, 2023 •

December 2022

Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991)

Postwar developments like Irvine or Tysons Corner may be ambitious, but will they ever develop proper urban civilization? Three decades ago, one…

Dec 31, 2022 •

September 2022

M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (2022)

An extremely online city planner makes the case against an institution wrongly assumed to be necessary

Sep 17, 2022 •

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