Is this something people would be interested in? I'm actually surprised this hasn't already come together considering there are several threads about individual books. I've ditched all social media over the past two years, and while I think it has been a massive improvement for my overall mental health and quality of life one of the few things I do deeply miss is being able to easily discuss what I'm reading with others.
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ArchBoston Book Club (Book #1 - Abundance)
- Thread starter KCasiglio
- Start date
I'm going to interpret likes as at least a maybe. In which case let's go ahead and talk about some potential books! I'll throw a few out there. Something new/forward looking, something "classic", and something Boston focused.
Something Forward Looking: Abundance (2025) by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson - "To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough."
Something Classic: The High Cost of Free Parking (2011) by Donald Shoup - "One of the American Planning Association’s most popular and influential books is finally in paperback, with a new preface from the author on how thinking about parking has changed since this book was first published. In this no-holds-barred treatise, Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people, and why American motor vehicles now consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production. But it doesn't have to be this way. Shoup proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking – namely, charge fair market prices for curb parking, use the resulting revenue to pay for services in the neighborhoods that generate it, and remove zoning requirements for off-street parking. Such measures, according to the Yale-trained economist and UCLA planning professor, will make parking easier and driving less necessary. Join the swelling ranks of Shoupistas by picking up this book today. You'll never look at a parking spot the same way again."
Something Boston Focused: A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900 (2011) by Stephen Puleo - "In A City So Grand, Stephen Puleo chronicles this remarkable period in Boston’s history, in his trademark page-turning style. Our journey begins with the ferocity of the abolitionist movement of the 1850s and ends with the glorious opening of America’s first subway station, in 1897. In between we witness the thirty-five-year engineering and city-planning feat of the Back Bay project, Boston’s explosion in size through immigration and annexation, the devastating Great Fire of 1872 and subsequent rebuilding of downtown, and Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone utterance in 1876 from his lab at Exeter Place. These lively stories and many more paint an extraordinary portrait of a half century of progress, leadership, and influence that turned a New England town into a world-class city, giving us the Boston we know today."
Happy to hear other suggestions if people have any! I'll make a poll at the top of the thread in a few days.
Something Forward Looking: Abundance (2025) by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson - "To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough."
Something Classic: The High Cost of Free Parking (2011) by Donald Shoup - "One of the American Planning Association’s most popular and influential books is finally in paperback, with a new preface from the author on how thinking about parking has changed since this book was first published. In this no-holds-barred treatise, Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people, and why American motor vehicles now consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production. But it doesn't have to be this way. Shoup proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking – namely, charge fair market prices for curb parking, use the resulting revenue to pay for services in the neighborhoods that generate it, and remove zoning requirements for off-street parking. Such measures, according to the Yale-trained economist and UCLA planning professor, will make parking easier and driving less necessary. Join the swelling ranks of Shoupistas by picking up this book today. You'll never look at a parking spot the same way again."
Something Boston Focused: A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900 (2011) by Stephen Puleo - "In A City So Grand, Stephen Puleo chronicles this remarkable period in Boston’s history, in his trademark page-turning style. Our journey begins with the ferocity of the abolitionist movement of the 1850s and ends with the glorious opening of America’s first subway station, in 1897. In between we witness the thirty-five-year engineering and city-planning feat of the Back Bay project, Boston’s explosion in size through immigration and annexation, the devastating Great Fire of 1872 and subsequent rebuilding of downtown, and Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone utterance in 1876 from his lab at Exeter Place. These lively stories and many more paint an extraordinary portrait of a half century of progress, leadership, and influence that turned a New England town into a world-class city, giving us the Boston we know today."
Happy to hear other suggestions if people have any! I'll make a poll at the top of the thread in a few days.
Thank you those who voted! Our first book will be Abundance!
If you're planning to participate, I'd ask that you please pick up the book and read the introduction by next Friday, 4/25. Trying to keep this accessible I was thinking a one chapter per week cadence. That works out to roughly 33 pages a week over seven weeks. If that's too slow or fast of a cadence for people feel free to chime in. Feel free to post your own thoughts as you make your way through, but I'll post some discussion questions on Friday the 25th to prompt conversation.
Edit: Lol what r dates
If you're planning to participate, I'd ask that you please pick up the book and read the introduction by next Friday, 4/25. Trying to keep this accessible I was thinking a one chapter per week cadence. That works out to roughly 33 pages a week over seven weeks. If that's too slow or fast of a cadence for people feel free to chime in. Feel free to post your own thoughts as you make your way through, but I'll post some discussion questions on Friday the 25th to prompt conversation.
Edit: Lol what r dates
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I'm going to interpret likes as at least a maybe. In which case let's go ahead and talk about some potential books! I'll throw a few out there. Something new/forward looking, something "classic", and something Boston focused.
Happy to hear other suggestions if people have any! I'll make a poll at the top of the thread in a few days.
In the Something Classic category, the following trio remains indispensable:
Crabgrass Frontier
Asphalt Nation
Cadillac Desert (yes, by definition a non-Boston tale--but you can't tell the story of Boston, New England, and the Northeast in general in the 20th-century without also accounting for the relentless growth--metastization?--of the arid regions west of the 100th meridian and below the Pacific Northwest, requiring massive hydraulic interventions in order to sustain our modern lifestyle, and everything that means and portends)
I'll add a couple to a future "something else" pile; even if not for discussion these are some of my book recs!
Land is a Big Deal, a more approachable introduction to the principles in Progress and Poverty by Henry George, which in my opinion is an essential work to read on land policy.
Gaining Ground is an excellent book about the history of land reclamation in Boston, the how and the why. It's a comprehensive text, but approachable. (Pricy to buy, but available at BPL and to borrow online from the Internet Archive at link.)
Order Without Design is probably the best recent urban economics book that isn't a straight up textbook, but explores the intersection of market demand and planning action.
Land is a Big Deal, a more approachable introduction to the principles in Progress and Poverty by Henry George, which in my opinion is an essential work to read on land policy.
Gaining Ground is an excellent book about the history of land reclamation in Boston, the how and the why. It's a comprehensive text, but approachable. (Pricy to buy, but available at BPL and to borrow online from the Internet Archive at link.)
Order Without Design is probably the best recent urban economics book that isn't a straight up textbook, but explores the intersection of market demand and planning action.
Longfellow
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Not to jump the gun at all but I am an author actually! My book is coming out this summer — it’s fiction but features urban renewal heavily in the plot. Partially inspired by things I’ve learned on this forum. Would be happy to help get people copies if people agreed to read it. But it’s still a few months out.