Sustainable Cities MSc Reading List

You are not required to study anything specific before September. However, if you want to get into the swing of things beforehand then the list below serves as an entry point for your forthcoming programme. Most of the journal articles suggested here are free to access, but you may find that others are hidden behind paywalls. If that’s the case, you can often get hold of a free version of the article by looking up the author on ResearchGate or Academia.edu. And while academic books are often expensive to buy brand new, you can often find cheaper second-hand versions, or access them for free through libraries.

Books

• Joss, S. (2015) Sustainable Cities: Governing for Urban Innovation. London: Palgrave. (The first few chapters of this book provide an excellent broad introduction to the idea of the sustainable city.)
• Castán Broto, V. and Westman, L. (2019) Urban Sustainability and Justice: Just Sustainabilities and Environmental Planning. London: Zed Books.
• Douglas, G. C. C. (2018) The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hall, P. (2014) Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism, Abingdon: Routledge.
• Mattern, S. (2021) A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (A recent interesting take on the digitalisation of urban infrastructures.)

Journal articles and other texts

• Adams, D., O’Sullivan, M., Inch, A., Tait, M., and Watkins C. (2016), “Delivering the Value of Planning”, Royal Town Planning Institute, London. https://www.rtpi.org.uk/media/1915891/rtpi_delivering_the_value_of_planning_full_report_august_2016.pdf
• Angelo, H. and Wachsmith, D. (2020) Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Urban Studies, 57(11): 2201-2221. DOI: 10.1177/0042098020919081
• Caprotti, F., Cowley, R., Datta, A., Castán Broto, V., Gao, E., Georgeson, L., Herrick, C. Odendaal, N. and Joss, S. (2017). The New Urban Agenda: key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice. Urban Research & Practice, 10:3, 367-378. DOI: 10.1080/17535069.2016.1275618
• Oltermann, P. (2024) The social housing secret: how Vienna became the world’s most livable city. The Guardian, 10th January. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city
• Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J. and Newell, J.P. (2014) Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’. Landscape and Urban Planning, 125: 234-244. DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.01.017
• Wu F, Zhang F, Wang Z, 2015, “Planning China’s Future: How planners contribute to growth and development”, Royal Town Planning Institute Research, https://www.rtpi.org.uk/research/2015/october/planning-chinas-future-how-planners-contribute-to-growth-and-development/
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