• Hyperborder: The Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border and It’s Future
• Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town: Real Estate Development from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-First Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway
• The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City
• The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life
• The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream
• Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
• Large Parks
• To Build New York: 100 Years of Infrastructure
• Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Couple of books in this list are available in Kindle format. I have been using the Kindle app on my iPad to read books and find it really convenient.

One in every ten people lived in urban areas a century ago. Now, for the first time ever, most people live in cities. By 2050, the United Nations projects, almost three-quarters of the world’s population will call urban areas home. The majority of this growth is centered in struggling, developing countries of the Global South, but cities in developed (or Global North) countries face increasingly complex challenges as well.

To help manage and plan for this accelerating urbanization, the Rockefeller Foundation convened an exceptional group of urbanists–leading policy makers and government officials, finance experts, urban researchers, members of civil society organizations, and other innovators–for a Global Urban Summit at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. This book shares their diverse perspectives, creative approaches, and urgent agenda for harnessing the vast opportunities of urbanization for a better world.

Order this book free.

Update: The answers are up now.

Witold Rybczynski, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and the acclaimed author of Home and A Clearing in a Distance tackles this paradox in a subtle narrative of his experiences of a new development in his latest book, Last Harvest – How a Cornfield Became New Daleville: Real Estate Development in America from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and why we live in Houses Anyway. If the title and the subtitle hasn’t tired you, I’m sure it certainly has piqued your interest. Simon and Schuster was kind enough to send me a review copy because the conflict of promoting new urbanism in the face of persistent popular choice for regular homes has always been a subject of interest for me. Rybczynski takes us along on the slow path of a real-life development of a residential sub-division in rural Pennsylvania called New Daleville. Located on a former cornfield, New Daleville was conceptualized by its developers as a neotraditional development, complete with homes built close to each other to encourage a sense of intimacy and community.

Rybczynski assumes the role of a bystander as he witnesses the often slow-moving process of real estate development that is often fraught with bureaucratic redtape and technical limitations. However, at no point do we sense a feeling of hopelessness or exasperation with the process but instead reveal in the everyday process of getting things done in the real world. At one point in the book, Rybczynski shares an incident regarding disposal of treated waste water and how an unexpected change in plans requires working around a sub-optimal solution that would inordinately delay the project. As students in architecture or land development school, we often tend to overlook such petty details but in the real world, they often tend to be the biggest obstacles in getting the work done.

The underlying theme of the book is utilizing and remaining true to the form of neotraditional development. We read plenty of background literature on the development of New Urbanism and Celebration and Seaside, Florida make repeated appearances in the narrative. While arguing for a different perspective in our living, Rybczynski does not shy away from emphasizing the decisions of owning a home and even having larger bathrooms as perfectly in line with our real-world needs. Rybczynski underlines the fact that new residential development although encroaching on natural agricultural land need not resort to unoriginal cookie-cutter homes that we have come to hate. Customized home building that emphasizes on architectural treatment of facades gives as much importance to the exterior as it lends a subtle yet strong complementary effect on the neighborhood. This effect on the community is not lost on the developers who are not only selling a house but are also looking to create a community that blends in with the rest of the town.

Overall, I quite liked the book. It was an easy and refreshing read quite different from overbearing polemics that often chastise us for giving in to our selfish need and indulging in sprawl-encouraging homes. Rybczynski’s book gives us an insight into how the developers understand this growing need for neotraditional development and highlights their efforts through this engaging anecdotal read.

[source]. Edward Burtynsky recently released his pithily-named book, China that contains several photographs like the one above that depict the vast manufacturing industry in China. The mass employment pattern of such industries have spawned townships that are akin to manufacturing towns that dotted the Rust Belt in the United States in the earlier part of last century. Almost all workers are employed by a single industry and work and live together in high rise apartments. Characterized by long working hours, most workers either have no need for activities apart from work or aren’t given opportunity to indulge in any such activity. The other day I was talking with my significant other regarding the proclivity of having acquaintances and friends outside of our working environment and if lack of such options would have any detrimental effect on our lives. It looks like these workers simply don’t have the luxury of such options. The images of the workers housing as shown below are indicative of their work-centric lives:

I am sure the workers are better off than living in the countryside where they couldn’t eke out a decent living wage. But I wonder what will be the repercussions on their social lives of living in such an urbanscape. Is it rapidly becoming the form of urban spaces in countless cities across China as they struggle to fulfill the demands of a consumer society?

Burtynsky in his book says that “these images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire, a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.”

Geoff Manaugh says the book will be divided up into three major sections – Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, and Landscape Futures covering diverse topics like “plate tectonics and J.G. Ballard to geomagnetic harddrives and undiscovered Manhattan bedrooms, via offshore oil derricks, airborne utopias, wind power, fossil cities, statue disease, inflatable cathedrals, diamond mines, science fiction and the city, pedestrianization schemes, the architecture of the near-death experience,”…and more.

It definitely should be a fun read.