Books: Key To The City

On bsky, I follow Peter Bednár. He’s primarily an architect, writes about urban planning and a while ago, he recorded several episodes of a podcast about urban planning, which is how I learned about him. If you understand Czech, I highly recommend it, the content is insightful and also hilariously funny. Anyway.

As I was looking for stuff to read, I came upon one of his posts about the book “Key To The City” by Sara C. Bronin. I did not know much about urban planning, but the topic fascinates me (especially because I feel like Czechia has tons to learn about it). The book was supposed to cover it in detail, so I picked it up and gave it a shot.

The book is divided into topical chapters, each one concerning itself with a different concept in city planning. Each topic is illustrated with a case study (or several case studies) of an American city which the author is familiar with (Houston, Hartford…). Along the way, the author discusses the different regulations and how they shape the makeup and the atmosphere of a community. It is essentially a collection of good and bad practices in urban planning, and how they came to be.

My first insight from the book is how utterly stupid some of the regulations are/were. For example, some communities in New England mandate really large minimum lot sizes (think roughly a football field). A minimum lot size requirement means that e.g. for a single-family home, you need it to be built on a lot of a certain minimum size. How could anyone think that this is a good idea? Of course this results in really sparse neighbourhoods which are difficult to serve with public transport and services.

Secondly, it really surprised me how much of the “stupid” regulations were basically racial discrimination hidden behind a “safety/preservation of the spirit of the neighbourhood”. It loosely reminded me of how it is really hard to get ML classifiers not to discriminate; they often just find some proxy which is just as discriminatory. It feels like it is the same with people designing regulations.

Overall, I would very much recommend the book to anyone curious about urban planning. It can be a bit content-sparse at times, but is insightful.