How to Go Deeper on Urbanism Content
A free tool I hope can be a good resource for you.
I stumbled upon urbanism by accident.
As I was scrolling course electives during my junior year at the University of Missouri, I saw a course called “The City.” I loved the course, discovered the Strong Towns website doing research for a paper, and the rest was history.
It didn’t take me long to be “red-pilled.” But it took much to overcome the “I don’t know what I don’t know” problem. I loved Strong Towns, but who should I read next? What books should I buy? What are the “classics?” What’s driving the conversation?
Sure, there are plenty of “Top books of the decade” lists out there and things of the sort. But when I was just starting to dive into this space, I would’ve killed for a comprehensive content hub that pointed me to the most influential and important books, websites, podcasts, leaders, etc.
So I built one this week: Learn Urbanism OS.
Learn Urbanism OS is a free resource with lists of the books, websites, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube Channels, Twitter accounts (people and organizations), and digital communities (Slack) that are shaping the urbanism conversation.
Because some of the lists can get pretty long, there’s also a section below the lists where you can pull out some of your favorite discoveries to revisit later on.
The resource lives in Notion, so just click the link at the bottom of this newsletter for access, and there are directions in the resource for how to duplicate it into your own Notion hub. From there, the page is totally customizable: You can add sections I’ve left out, add or remove people/resources, and really make it your own.
If you don’t use Notion, there are also directions for how you can obtain a free offline version of the document.
I intend to continue improving Learn Urbanism OX in the coming weeks and months, and would love your help in doing so. If there are books, people, etc. that I’ve overlooked or mistakenly left out, or other elements you wish the product had, please reply to this email and let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
Really excited to dive into this! I’ve been hoping to really take a deeper look into how we got here and seek actual data backed policies that have changed nations and even smaller localities. Thank you for putting this together. I’ll share on my newsletter this week!
What’s amazing is how little Christopher Alexander is discussed and how I never see his book a pattern language or many others ever mentioned in urbanism conversations. He’s arguably one of the greatest minds of the 20th century on this topic.