CP&DR Podcast: Top Planning Books of 2020

Leslie Kern's new book Feminist City will likely ring familiar with women planners -- and provide male planners crucial insights for making cities more welcoming and equitable for everyone.

Los Angeles-based planner Max Podemski authors A Paradise of Small Houses, celebrating the history and future of working-class housing from row houses to triple-deckers to the dingbat. 

Henry Grabar's breezy Paved Paradise is must reading for planners -- especially in California.

A new book accounts for ways major infrastructure projects bust their budgets and make mincemeat of their schedules; another predicts demographic upheaval due to climate change.

A bumper crop of books related to California urbanism came out during the pandemic; Josh Stephens reviews titles about the Central Valley, San Diego history, Los Angeles pop culture, and more.

In his new book, Eric Klinenberg can't quite decide whether social infrastructure is physical and tangible or whether it's something squishier. >>read more

NRDC Senior Attorney David Pettit reviews "Navigating the California Coastal Act" by Jana Zimmer >>read more

The New Urban Crisis provides a tidy, timely summary of the current urban problem, in all its enormity. >>read more

You think this is going to be another piece about the shortcomings and backfires of the California Environmental Quality Act. It's not.

Where is Robert Bruegemann when you need him?

A few years back, Bruegmann wrote Sprawl: A Compact History, an exaltation of low-density growth. It called for cities to double-down on all the conventions and mistakes of the previous 50 years. It was a disturbingly anachronistic, but it was provocative, and it was passionate.

It seems that these days there's still plenty of in urbanist literature, but, for better or worse, provocation is getting harder to come by.

A few weeks ago the nation's public radio listeners let out a collective sigh of lament when the Tappet Brothers announced the discontinuation of Car Talk. Cars are so much of who we are that it's no wonder that Car Talk was public radio's highest rated show. It's also no wonder that there's no outcry for a "Public Transit Talk" - though two authors are trying to change that.  

The mere existence of Planning Los Angeles speaks volumes about its subject. It's hard to imagine any other city � especially one as relatively young as Los Angeles is � that could inspire a book with over 40 distinct essays by an impressive array of academics and practitioners.