City Architecture

99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive, and the sidewalks we traverse. The show celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with intriguing tales of both designers and the people impacted by their designs.

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the...

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” — from Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo —...

What if an entire empire was erased from history—deliberately? For centuries, maps across Europe recorded the vast land of Tartaria—an empire stretching from the edges of Europe deep into Asia. By the 1800s, it vanished completely. No gradual decline. No explanation. Just silence. Echoes of Tartaria: The Mystery of a Forgotten Empire invites you into one of history’s most unsettling enigmas. Was Tartaria a misunderstood cartographic term, or a powerful civilization with advanced knowledge that threatened the modern order? From star forts and monumental architecture to tales of giants ...

Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide to the City offers an unexpected blueprint to the criminal possibilities in the world all around us. You'll never see the city the same way again. At the core of A Burglar's Guide to the City is...

Landscape designer and historian Wade Graham follows the acclaimed American Eden with a lively, accessible cultural history of modern cities—from suburbs, downtown districts, and exurban sprawl, to shopping malls and “sustainable” developments—seen through the lens of planning, design...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER “A comprehensive, entertaining, and compelling argument for how rebuilding social infrastructure can help heal divisions in our society and move us forward.”—Jon Stewart NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR “Engaging.”—Mayor Pete Buttigieg, The...

Shortlisted for the Zócalo Book Prize Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New Republic “Consistently entertaining and often downright funny.”—The New Yorker “Wry and revelatory.” —The New York Times "A romp, packed with tales of anger, violence, theft...

This riveting, true account of the 1929 race to build New York City's tallest skyscraper evokes the glory of an exciting time long past.

Anthropic's first official technical certification has arrived. The exam does not test clever prompts. It tests whether you can build production AI systems that actually work at scale. The Claude Certified Architect, Foundations (CCA-F) covers multi-agent orchestration, structured output validation, hallucination prevention through programmatic guardrails, context window economics, and Claude Code in CI/CD pipelines. This guide prepares you for the CCA-F exam and is a standalone reference for production LLM architecture. The architectural principles apply to any production LLM-based system,...

Most guidebooks tell you how to skip the line at the Vatican. This one tells you why the line is there in the first place. The Curious Traveler in Rome: 10 Reasons We Can't Stop Visiting the Eternal City isn't a checklist or a glossy photo album. It's a smart, engaging companion for travelers who want to understand what they're seeing. Why do millions flock to the Colosseum every year? How did pilgrimage turn into the world's first tourism industry? What goes on at the Roman Forum today? Why does Rome feel so alive in its chaos, even today? Each chapter explores one of the forces that ...

From “tomorrow’s greatest designer” (The Atlantic), a personal and deeply researched look at how the choices we build into our environment reflect and determine the way we think, connect, and live. We've been led to believe that purposefully designed spaces are something reserved only for...

Dickson D. Despommier proposes a visionary yet achievable plan for creating a new, self-sustaining urban landscape. He argues that we can find solutions through the concept of biomimicry: emulating successful strategies found in nature. A better city is possible if we heed the lessons that forests and trees teach about how to store carbon, grow food, collect rainwater, and convert sunlight into energy.

This New York Times bestseller intimately depicts urban life in a gripping book that slips behind cold statistics and sensationalism to reveal the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour. One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In her extraordinary...

Dive into the astounding "Secrets of the Subterranean City," a riveting eBook that cracks open the veil of mystery surrounding the world beneath our feet. Journey into enigmatic and labyrinthine passages hidden deep within Earth's crust, where every corner holds new secrets. As you turn each page, find yourself drawn into the ancient allure of Derinkuyu, a marvel of humankind's architectural genius, birthed into existence well before the advent of modern tools. This eBook intriguingly unravels the architectural splendor behind the city, dissecting its ingenious defense mechanisms, its ...

Journey through ancient ritual sites and modern megacities to discover how humanity’s drive to build shapes our world. Perfect for your daily commute, this fast-paced and immersive exploration transforms the globe into a living story. See how early villages evolved into sprawling urban...

Journalist Julie Satow's thrilling, unforgettable history of how one illustrious hotel has defined our understanding of money and glamour, from the Gilded Age to the Go-Go Eighties to today's Billionaire Row. From the moment in 1907 when New York millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt strode...

Digital transformation has redefined how governments, companies, and institutions understand territory. Today, geospatial data is not just about maps — it is strategic infrastructure for planning, environmental management, urban monitoring, territorial security, logistics, and evidence-based decision-making. Geospatial Solutions Architecture is a complete technical-professional guide that presents, in a structured and in-depth way, how to build modern geospatial platforms capable of integrating data, services, analytics, and territorial intelligence. This book leads the reader from the ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the hosts of The War on Cars podcast, a searing indictment of how cars ruin everything—and what we can do to fight back When the very first cars rolled off production lines, they were a technological marvel, predicted to make life easier and better for all Americans...

Jane Jacobs and the Human City: Exploring the Principles of Human-Centered Urban Design is a powerful exploration of one of the most influential urban thinkers of the twentieth century. Jane Jacobs changed the way the world understands cities by insisting that real urban vitality comes from people—their interactions, diversity, and daily lives—not from abstract blueprints or top-down planning. This book introduces Jacobs’s life and legacy while connecting her ideas to the modern framework of human-centered design. From her defense of sidewalks and public spaces to her critique of ...