As we navigate these uncertain times together, we’d like to share a selection of books from our office (and some extra) that we hope you might enjoy discovering while working from home.

  1. ‘Dictionary of City of London Street Names’ by Al Smith – one full of curiosities. Dip in and out as the mood strikes.
  2. ‘Dinner’ by Neville Gabie – Neville Gabie was invited to make a new work, which responded to the history of the former Young’s Brewery. Based on a historic photograph found in Young’s Archive of a staff Christmas Dinner held in Wandsworth Town Hall in 1948, Gabie’s proposal was to restage the event, but with a diverse mix of people drawn from the local community, former Young’s Employees, and the builders, planners, developers, architects and marketers involved in transforming this historic location. Learn their stories in Gabie’s ‘Dinner’.
  3. ‘Culture & Placemaking: Imagine, Create, Connect’ by Futurecity – IMAGINE charts our culture & placemaking strategies, linking up individual projects to take a strategic view of new creative districts for London and across the UK. CREATE looks at outputs; our unique approach to embedding arts and culture right through a scheme’s design and programme. CONNECT charts how we broker distinct creative partnerships between clients and the cultural sector. Read more here!
  4. ‘Pop-up City: City-Making in a Fluid World’ by Joop de Boer – popupcity.net has grown from a small blog into an international online platform for forward-thinking city-making with a monthly readership of over 100,000. It has always been the dream of the authors to turn the rich online content of their blog into a beautiful, inspiring book that tells a remarkable story of cities and urban design in a fluid world. 
  5. ‘Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There’ by Rutger Bregman – We live in a time of unprecedented upheaval, with questions about the future, society, work, happiness, family and money, and yet no political party of the right or left is providing us with answers. Rutger Bregman, a bestselling Dutch historian, explains that it needn’t be this way.
  6. ‘Visual Dissent’ by Peter Kennard – This fully illustrated anthology showcases key images from Peter Kennard’s work as Britain’s foremost political artist over the last fifty years. The book’s release was accompanied by an exhibition of Kennard’s work at The Gallery at Foyles, curated by Futurecity. 
  7. ‘Open Space’ by SendPoints – Focusing mainly on the public landscape in the urban area, the book presents 56 of the world’s most distinctive urban landscape projects with high quality pictures and design plans that stimulate readers’ visual senses and detailed descriptions that provide an overall realization of the landscape design works.
  8. ‘Concrete Canvas: How street art is changing the way our cities look’ by Lee Bofkin – What happens when you look at graffiti and street art as unlimited art forms instead of urban phenomena? Concrete Canvas does just that; investigating the media the artists work with, the canvases they work on, the themes that arise through their work, and the way their art redefines the spaces in which it is set.
  9. ‘Going Public: Public Architecture, Urbanism and Interventions’ by S. Ehmann, S. Borges, Lukas Feireiss – Going Public presents a compelling international selection of extraordinary current architectural projects in public space. Their objectives are as diverse as the structures themselves and range from providing recreational or cultural opportunities to facilitating social interaction. 
  10. ‘The Image of the City’ by Kevin Lynch – in-depth analysis from the 70s on the role of the built environment and how various elements impact how people move through and behave in cities. This book is where the term ‘placemaking’ first appears. 
  11. ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’ by William H Whyte – a groundbreaking work in the urban design field where Whyte analysed New York’s public plazas and drew conclusions on how to design more ‘livable’ public spaces for urban environments
  12. ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ by Jane Jacobs – looking at cities from a sociologist’s perspective, Jacobs criticised modernist planning practices, advocating instead for dense, mixed-use, walkable neighbourhoods
  13. ‘The Great Good Place’ by Ray Oldenburg – Communities live and die by the presence of “Third places,” the shops, cafes, salons where communities gather and socialise. In his seminal work, Oldenburg analyses the power of these spaces and their ability to bring people together – and explores how we can protect these in modern city building.
  14. ‘Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City’ by Richard Sennett – In ‘Building and Dwelling’, Richard Sennett distils a lifetime’s thinking and practical experience to explore the relationship between the good built environment and the good life. He argues for, and describes in rich detail, the idea of an open city, one in which people learn to manage complexity. He shows how the design of cities can enrich or diminish the everyday experience of those who dwell in them.
  15. ‘Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design’ by Charles Montgomery – ‘Happy City’ is the story of how the solutions to this century’s problems lie in unlocking the secrets to great city living. This is going to be the century of the city. But what actually makes a good city? Why are some cities a joy to live in?
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