The Ultimate Strong Towns Reading List
What better way to learn about and immerse in a topic than through a book? We’re a pretty interdisciplinary movement here, so we count everyone from economists to psychologists to historians among our great teachers. If you want to dig into the Strong Towns approach and see the many sources from which we draw wisdom and inspiration, this list is for you.
It would probably take you a few years to get through everything on the list, so we’ve broken it down into core texts—the must reads—and then various topics. Maybe you dive into all the planning-related books first, or maybe you pick one book from each section. It’s really a choose-your-own-adventure.
“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
Core Texts
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution for American Prosperity, by Charles Marohn
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs
American Society
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, by Chris Arnade
Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, by Tim Carney
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard
“We are not exactly sure what we are growing toward, but we compensate for this shortcoming by accelerating.”
Political Economy
Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen
Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, by Jane Jacobs
Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses, by Stacy Mitchell
Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance, by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street, by Tomas Sedlacek
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott
Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Housing
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis, by Daniel Parolek
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein
“If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”
Miscellaneous
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, by Jared Diamond
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Howard Kunstler
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit
This is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are, by Melody Warnick
“Tactical Urbanism is pure American know-how. It is the common sense that housed, fed, and prospered an entire continent of penniless immigrants.”
Planning and Design
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein
Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, by Alain Bertaud
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation, by Sonia Hirt
The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Declineof America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler
Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change, by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia
The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability, by Steve Mouzon
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, by Janette Sadik-Kahn
Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, by Jeff Speck
Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment, by Ann Sussman
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
Psychology
Risk, by John Adams
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
What would you add to the reading list? Let us know in the comments.
FREE EBOOK
In this free ebook, Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn recommends his essential books, with brief commentary on how they’ve influenced the international movement to build stronger and more financially resilient cities.