In September 2025, we discussed a classic urbanist book, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. We considered what this book, written nearly 65 years ago, says that can guide cities like Atlanta today. We aren’t the only ones asking that question. In 2016, the New Yorker magazine looked back on Death…

Our August 2025 book, The 15-Minute City, argued that cities would be happier and more resilient places if they changed how neighborhoods worked. The change: Bring nearly everything people need for daily life within a 15-minute walk, bike ride or bus ride of home. The happiness comes, the author says, from neighbors seeing one another…

In October 2024, we discussed A Kind of Genius, a book about a remarkable reformer who created important changes in New York in the 1960s and 1970s using persuasion, people skills, political awareness and good processes. Are there people like Herb Sturz around today? In Philadelphia, a public official is completing a monumental effort to…

More than a quarter of downtown Atlanta is given over to a single land use, the parking of idle cars. If this “sea of parking” were put to better uses, as housing, retail, offices or green space, downtown would benefit, as we learned from our January 2024 book Paving Paradise. So is the city preventing…

Our June 2024 book, Ghosting the News, is about the decline of local journalism and how this hurts democracy and good government. Others are focused on this issue, including the Pew Research Center. In a new study, Pew researchers found Americans worry about the decline of local news media but pay less attention to what…

Love Our Cities was our March 2024 book about how citizens who volunteer for community improvement projects can change a city. It’s also the name of the organization founded by the book’s authors to spread the idea nationally. One of the authors, Eric Jung, talked about the idea, the organization and the movement it inspired…

Streetfight was the subject of our November 2022 discussion. It’s a book about how New York reclaimed some of its streets for pedestrians, cyclists, transit and other uses. The author was the city’s crusading transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. In a 2018 interview, Sadik-Khan talks about one of her efforts, building protected bike lanes. And she…

Golden Gates is a book about California’s housing affordability crisis that we discussed in March 2023. In our discussion, we looked for ways Urban Atlanta could avoid a similar fate. So what has California done since this 2020 book was published in dealing with its crisis? In April 2023 New York Times columnist Ezra Klein…

A theme of Right of Way, our book for November 2023, was the influence that state transportation departments’ design manuals had on highways and roads, much of it wrongheaded. A study by Johns Hopkins University verifies this. It looked at car crashes on state roads with 12-foot lanes (the kinds recommended by the manuals) versus…

For an overview of how parking shaped Los Angeles and other cities, including Atlanta, listen to this 99% Invisible podcast. It also has an interview with Paving Paradise author Henry Grabar. We discussed his book in January 2024.