Archive - Colin Marshall's Books on Cities

Tim Cocks, Lagos: Supernatural City (2022)

Can a non-Nigerian, much less an Englishman, hope to understand the "impossibility-ism" of Africa's star megacity?

Feb 21 •

January 2024

Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community…

The sociologist who popularized the idea of the "third place" finds what's gone missing from American life

Jan 27 •

December 2023

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023)

Why a pricey suburban college town is the dark heart of the American empire

Dec 31, 2023 •

October 2023

David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (2015)

Writers tend to obsess over Detroit's decline, but David Maraniss focuses instead on the city's last glory days in the early 1960s, the time of Motown…

Oct 9, 2023 •

September 2023

Georges Perec, Lieux (2022)

In 1969, Georges Perec launched himself into a twelve-year-long project to describe twelve meaningful places in Paris — a project that went unseen by…

Sep 2, 2023 •

June 2023

Kate Ascher, The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005)

A New York City insider's lavishly illustrated explanation of her city's urban infrastructure, in both its might and its decrepitude

Jun 27, 2023 •

March 2023

Robert Fouser, Exploring Cities with Robert Fouser (로버트 파우저의 도시 탐구기) (2019)

An American linguist-urbanist remembers the cities he's known, from Ann Arbor to Tokyo to Dublin to Seoul — and does so entirely in Korean

Mar 15, 2023 •

December 2022

Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (1991)

Postwar developments like Irvine or Tysons Corner may be ambitious, but will they ever develop proper urban civilization? Three decades ago, one…

Dec 31, 2022 •

September 2022

M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (2022)

An extremely online city planner makes the case against an institution wrongly assumed to be necessary

Sep 17, 2022 •

August 2022

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990)

Does Mike Davis' grim but celebrated assessment of power, violence, and globalization in Los Angeles hold up three decades later?

Aug 18, 2022 •

July 2022

Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico (2021)

The temptations of a sinking, brown-aired, mismanaged, inescapably stimulating metropolis

Jul 2, 2022 •

May 2022

Witold Rybczynski, City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World (1995)

Why doesn't North America have a London or Paris? An architect-critic explains

May 2, 2022 •

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