Urban Planning, Placemaking & Community

Making space for one another is a necessity that takes many forms in these works for both large and local community building

(In order of publication)


Creative Instigation Cover
Creative Instigation: The Art & Strategy of Authentic Community Engagement

By Fern Tiger

Creative Instigation is a collection of in-depth case stories focused on effective and innovative community engagement and policymaking in diverse cities across the western U.S.


Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House

By Joyce Milambiling

The roles that Christodora House has played from 19th-century settlement house up to its newest form. Settlement house workers have helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars.


Zoned Out! Race Displacement, and City Planning in New York City, (Revised Edition)

Edited by Tom Angotti and Sylvia Morse

Zoned Out! shows how gentrification and displacement of low-income communities of color have occurred in Williamsburg, Harlem and Chinatown, neighborhoods facing massive displacement of people of color, and looks at ways the city can address inequalities, promote authentic community-based planning and develop housing in the public domain.


We Built a Village: Cohousing and the Commons

By Diane Rothbard Margolis
Foreword by David Bollier

We Built a Village is both a memoir and a sociological analysis that describes the process of planning and building an early cohousing community in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid 1990s, setting in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together.


How Spaces Become Places: Place Makers Tell Their Stories

By John F. Forester

How Spaces Become Places feature stories of community members acting together to transform edgy, empty, contested, or unsafe spaces into functional, safe, convivial places. Pragmatic, real life accounts offer edifying and instructive examples of the kinds of work a variety of readers can do within their own communities.


Cover of Jane Jacobs's First City
Jane Jacobs’s First City: Learning from Scranton, Pennsylvania

By Glenna Lang

A brilliant work of scholarship that convincingly shows how Jane Jacobs’s canonical work on urbanism and the life of great cities, her work on city and national economies, and her underlying social and ethical foundations developed in the historic, mid-sized city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.


Cover of Main Street
Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All

By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD

How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This intriguing question took social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries. From these visits Fullilove has discerned the larger architecture of Main Streets: the ways that Main Streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes, how they are a marker for the integrity of civilization—and the marks aren’t always good. 


Cover of Placemaking with Children and Youth
Placemaking with Children and Youth: Participatory Practices for Planning Sustainable Communities

By Victoria Derr, Louise Chawla, and Mara Mintzer

An illustrated, essential guide to engaging children and teens in the process of urban design.


Cover of Works of Heart
Works of Heart: Building Village Through the Arts

Revised Edition
By Lynne Elizabeth and Suzanne Young

Citizen artists revitalize places, celebrate culture, and inspire social change in this beautiful introduction to community-engaged arts.


Cover of Homeboy Came to Orange
Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power

By Mindy Thompson Fullilove and Ernest Thompson and
Introduction by Coleman A. Young
Foreword by Dominic T. Moulden
Afterword by Molly Rose Kaufman

The story of a union organizer who found a second career in community organizing and helped a Jim Crow city become a better place.


Cover of The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. A man throwing a young boy up in the air like he is flying
The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race

By Carl C. Anthony

Carl Anthony interweaves urban history, racial justice, and cosmology with personal experiences as an architect/planner, environmentalist, and Black American.  By connecting the struggles for social and racial justice to the universe, it creates a new story for our time.


Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It

By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD
Foreword by Carlos F. Peterson and Mary Travis Bassett

Root Shock examines three different US cities to unmask the crippling results of decades-old disinvestment in communities of color and the urban renewal practices that ultimately destroyed these neighborhoods for the advantage of developers and the elite.


Growing A Life: Teen Gardeners Harvest Food, Health, and Joy

By Illéne Pevec, PhD

A testament to the influential nature of educational and community gardening programs for teens.


From Foreclosure to Fair Lending: Advocacy, Organizing, Occupy, and the Pursuit of Equitable Credit

Edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires

This book informs a renewed movement for fair lending and fair housing. Leading advocates and specialists examine strategic initiatives to realize objectives of the federal Fair Housing Act as well as state and local laws.


Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities

By Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD

An identification of the problems of socially, economically, and racially divided neighborhoods and nine tools that can mend them.


Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Space

Edited by Rick Bell, Lance Jay Brown, Lynne Elizabeth and Ronald Shiffman

In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, leading planners and social scientists examine public space today and freedom of assembly.


Service-Learning in Design and Planning: Educating at the Boundaries

Edited by Tom Angotti, Cheryl S. Doble, and Paula Horrigan

Urban planning and architecture educators challenge traditional community-university relationships by modeling meaningful and reciprocal partnerships for community-engaged learning.


Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation

By Sharon Gamson Danks

Case Studies from North America, Scandinavia, Japan, and Great Britain demonstrate natural outdoor teaching environments that support hand-on learning in science, math, language, and art in ways that nurture healthy imagination and socialization.


What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs

Edited by Stephen Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth

A timely revisitation of renowned urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs’ lifework, What We See invites thirty pundits and practitioners across fields to refresh Jacobs’ economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. Combining personal and professional observations with meditations on Jacobs’ insights, essayists bring their diverse experience to bear to sketch the blueprints for the living city.


Building Commons and Community

By Karl Linn

Building Commons and Community documents 45 years of the late Karl Linn’s legacy creating neighborhood spaces for communities and by communities. In this richly-illustrated landscape-format hardcover book, Linn presents his philosophies and practical wisdom.


Building Together: Case Studies in Participatory Planning and Community Building

By Roger Katan with Ronald Ronald Shiffman

Case studies of neighborhood developments from North and South America, Europe, and Africa that span more than forty years. This book offers a seminal treatise on the community based design practices of participatory planning an advocacy architecture.


New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development

By Arlene Goldbard

An inspiring, foundational book that defines the burgeoning field of community cultural development.