The City Reader

The fourth edition of the highly successful The City Reader brings together the very best of publications on the city. Classic writings by such authors as Lewis Mumford, Ernest W. Burgess, LeCorbusier, Lewis Wirth, Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch meet the best contemporary writings of, among others, Sir Peter Hall, Richard Florida, Mike Davis, Michael Porter, Robert Putnam, Andrus Duany, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Castells. New to the fourth edition are important classic writings on urban economics by Wilbur Thomson and those on bosses and machines by James Bryce, Jane Addams, and William L. Riordan, and new contemporary material on sustainable urban development, the creative class, metropolitics, occidentalism, Asian megacities, and urban futurism by The Bruntland Commission, Richard Florida, Myron Orfield, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Aprodicio Laquian, and Joel Kotkin.

Fifty-seven generous selections are included: a combination of  forty-six readings from the third edition and eleven entirely new selections. Structured to aid student understanding, this anthology features main and part introductions, as well as individual introductions to the selected articles. Each selection is introduced with a brief intellectual biography and a review of the author’s writings and related literature, an explanation of how the piece fits into the broader context of urban history and practice, competing ideological perspectives on the city, and the major current debates concerning race and gender, globalization, terrorism, the impact of information technology on cities, civic engagement, and postmodernism.

The City Reader provides the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of urban studies, old and new. It is illustrated with over forty photographs and is essential reading for anyone interested in the city.

Richard LeGates is Professor of Urban Studies at San Francisco State University.

Frederic Stout is Lecturer in Urban Studies at Stanford University.