Green Earth by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is credited with helping create the genre of climate fiction, and his book Green Earth is yet another example of that. Set in Washington, DC, Robinson draws from his own personal experience living and working in the capital city. “What I like about DC is that there is kind of an electricity in the air, a human electricity,” Robinson told CityLab. “You walk the streets, you see people from all over the world. To go to the world capital and settle there is a statement. It’s an attempt to wrest control of one’s fate.” But where the fictional part of the story begins is in its characters — when he portrays federal bureaucrats as a positive force for good.

Biourbanism: Cities as Nature by Adrian McGregor

“If we can understand that cities are part of nature — even if they don’t really look like nature — that means we’ve got to change how we plan with them, how we work with them, and what our future looks like on spaceship Earth,” Adrian McGregor says. That’s the premise of Biourbanism: Cities as Nature, which looks at how effective urban planning and design can be achieved by viewing cities through a natural lens. McGregor sees cities as instrumental to lead the fight against the climate crisis. “There’s a policy gap between a federal government making decarbonization commitments and actual city policy,” he says. “They’re not really thinking clearly about where the emissions are coming from and therefore how to target them.”

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

Journalist Henry Grabar has a pretty simple solution for better city living: parking reform. The act of parking, for so many, is an aggravating experience. “You’re more likely to be killed over a parking space than you are to be killed by a shark,” Grabar told CityLab. In his book Paved Paradise, he argues that the key to happier residents is transforming parking policies to make them smarter and more convenient, and by undoing some of the privileges given to drivers in order to help boost multimodal transportation. “It’s very hard to overrule the instinctive feeling that parking ought to be available when I want it, where I want it, for the price I want to pay, which is zero,” Grabar said. “A lot of smart parking policy deviates from those assumptions, like charging for coveted street parking in busy locations, or trying to encourage people to park in a garage a few blocks away and then walk a bit.”

Built From the Fire by Victor Luckerson

What happened after the Tulsa race massacre? It’s a question often lost when thinking about the violence that saw one of the wealthiest historic Black American neighborhoods burned down, and its residents killed or chased out. Built From the Fire seeks to tell the story of Greenwood from start to end, past the initial tragedy that wiped out Black Wall Street and the destructive urban renewal plans and physically divisive highways that followed. For Victor Luckerson, who moved to Tulsa and embedded himself in Greenwood’s community and archives in order to tell the story right, the policies and actions of local government officials did as much damage, if not more, to the neighborhood’s heritage than the initial conflagration. “I would say the massacre was more devastating in the short term, and urban renewal more devastating in the long term,” he says.

There Goes the Neighborhood by Jade Adia

It’s not just heartbreak and bad grades that teens are facing — now, it’s gentrification too. Author Jade Adia found inspiration in the Los Angeles youth that came out to protest against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd, and wrote There Goes the Neighborhood with those young people in mind. Her debut young adult novel tells the story of 15-year-old Rhea, who devises a plan to save her best friend’s family from eviction, as gentrifiers threaten to upend her neighborhood in South Los Angeles. “I wanted to tackle the topic [of gentrification] in the most accessible way possible,” Adia told CityLab, “by putting young people and their experiences on the front lines of the conversation.”

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