The Big Roads, by Earl Swift, tells the story of America’s highways. The book begins by exploring the era when a highway was merely a dirt road, and ends with a look at the lasting impact of the Interstate Highway System.

Roberta Brandes Gratz, one of Planetizen’s Top 100 Urban Thinkers, explores what makes New York City work in her book The Battle for Gotham New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. With a title like you would assume the book dealt heavily with details of how Jacobs and Moses operated and their battles over urban renewal, but you would be wrong if you did.

The Agile City by James S. Russell is an easy to read, pro-city book. Feeling much like a Richard Florida book at points, the author highlights examples of cities getting things right in regard to building wealth and dealing with the effects (and causes) of climate change. It is neither a book about green washing, nor is it filled with pie-in-the-sky “green” plans for how to remake the way we live. The book focuses on practical objectives to build wealth and well-being through cities.

Released February 10th, 2011, Trimuph of the City is the latest book to examine the value of cities. Written by Ed Glaseser, an economist at Harvard, the book explores “How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier.” Dwelling largely on the social aspects of cities, Glaeser walks through the various aspects of city life that enable cities to succeed or fail including public health, public education, and transportation. He walks through evidence-based examples of why cities work to increase their residents wealth and health, examining the spread of ideas and disease as well.

Garbage Land, by Elizabeth Royte, is billed as a book about “the secret trail of trash”. The author follows her waste streams from her Brooklyn home to their various destinations across the Northeast. This includes ride alongs with “san men”, visits to metal scrappers, discussions with composters, tours of MRF plants (materials recovery facility), water treatment plants, and the Fresh Kills landfill.

Milwaukee’s former Mayor, John Norquist, in his book The Wealth of Cities writes up the impacts of U.S. policies on our cities, lays out his foundational beliefs that today form a key plank of the New Urbanism movement, and shares his insight into how he believes cities should be governed.

The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg, discusses a part of community life that is fading in the U.S., the Third Place. Your First Place, your home, a Second Place is your place of work, and a Third Place is where you will be found when you’re not at the other two places.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, takes a broad look at the current economic crisis in his latest book. Florida starts The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by examining past economic crises, and how the country emerged stronger from them. These crises, or resets as Florida labels them, are valleys in the country’s economic performance when obsolete and dysfunctional systems are replaced by “the seeds of innovation and invention, of creativity and entrepreneurship”.

The High Cost of Free Parking makes the American Planning Association’s 100 Essential Books of Planning, and for good reason. Not because it is a particularly easy read, but because it will challenge the way you think about parking, that is assuming you think about parking.

Carjacked, The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effects On Our Lives, explores the love, lust, and reality of America’s car culture. The authors, Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez, have a refreshing and realistic take on America’s car obsession and its broad implications. From a teenager’s first car to an adult’s quest for the best car on the road, Carjacked has stories from across the country about the lengths people go to to get that coveted automobile. The latter half of the book extensively (but impressively briskly) explores the physiological, economical, and sociological effects of American car culture.