A Summer reading list
It’s a tradition in the British Parliament that during the Summer recess, the deeper thinkers in some of the political parties compile a Summer reading list for MPs to read. I must also admit that in writing this post I was inspired by Riccardo’s post on his blog about his wish that the young gunzels would head down to the libraries to round out their railway education with something broader and deeper than what Railpage has to offer.
With the end of the academic year in sight, the last exam taken care of and as with work year starting to run down, the long, glorious sunlit uplands of Christmas, New Year and summer beckons and it’s a good time to dust books off hiding in the unread pile and get ready to read them.
Thus, I’ve set up a summer reading list of transport- and urban planning related reading that may broaden the mind of Transport Textbook readers during the Summer. While I’ve read many of them and own quite a few as well, there’s some I haven’t yet read and some I want to read.
The 20 books I’ve listed are an eclectic mix of new and old, ’straight’ railway history and more nuanced historical studies of railways, not to mention the urban planning stuff which deals with the rest of the world beyond the railway boundary. If you don’t have these books at home, or can’t find them at your local library, there are many places to buy them online second hand at a reasonable price. Of course, comments, amendments and suggestions to the list are always welcome. Read on!
1. Robert Lee, Fruits of federation : the Grafton-Brisbane uniform gauge railway and Clarence River Bridge
2. Matthew Engel, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain
3. Paul Mees, A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City
4. Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie The Railway Station: A Social History
5. Ian Manning, The Open Street: public transport, motor cars and politics in Australian cities
6.Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities
7. Peter Hall, Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design in the 20th Century
8. Mark Bachels, Philip Laird and Peter Newman, Back on track: rethinking transport policy in Australia and New Zealand
9. Eric Harding, Uniform Railway Gauge
10. Bill Hosokawa, Old Man Thunder: Father of the Bullet Train
11. G. H. Fearnside All Stations West: the story of the Sydney-Perth standard gauge railway
12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch The railway journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century
13. Geoffrey Churchman Railway Electrification in Australia and New Zealand
14. John Gunn Along Parallel Lines: a history of the railways of New South Wales
15. David Burke Road through the Wilderness: the story of the transcontinental railway
16. Clive Forster Australian Cities: Continuity and Change
17. Kevin O’Connor, Robert Stimson and Maurie Daly Australia’s changing economic geography: A society divided
18. Brendan Gleeson Australian heartlands: Making space for hope in the suburbs
19. Brendan Gleeson and Nicholas Low Australian urban planning: new challenges, new agendas
20. John Kerr Triumph of narrow gauge : a history of Queensland Railways
The Publisher, Publication Date and ISBN for each of your suggested books would be extremely useful for searchs by libraries. Is there any chance of you republishing the list with this information?
Mwmbwls,
As much as it would be nice for me to provide people with that information, I believe there’s a rewarding effort in finding knowledge using one’s own resources without being led to it. I’ve provided enough information in the reading list for someone using any basic finding aid at a library or Google to start turning up publishers, publication dates and ISBNs for themselves.
I know this sounds mean-spirited of me, but part of the getting of knowledge is knowing how and where to find it. Good luck and thanks for your comment.
LS
LS, good idea. I’ll add a different ten for those looking for something more planning and politics of projects oriented.
1. Alan Altshuler and David Luberhoff Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment
2. William T. Bogart Don’t Call it Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the Twenty-First Century
3. Andrew Brown-May Melbourne Street Life
4. Bent Flyvbjerg Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice
5. Joel Garreau Edge City: Life on the New Frontier
6. Jonathan Levine Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land-Use
7. John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place
8. J. Brian McLoughlin Shaping Melbourne’s Future?: Town Planning, the State and Civil Society
9. Wolfgang Schivelbusch The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
10. Donald Shoup The High Cost of Free Parking
Ah, I just realised you listed Schivelbusch already. Perhaps replace it with this:
9. Anique Hommels Unbuilding cities : obduracy in urban socio-technical change
Russ,
I greatly enjoyed reading Garreau’s Edge City and struggled through Flyvbjerg as a set text in my Masters of Urban Planning course.
In my list I was trying to keep things more transport-oriented with a bit of urban planning thrown in to give a very broad context of the kind of political and planning environment transport operates in. The Gleeson book is one of the best texts in terms of how it pulls lots of different strands of planning together with a real humanist touch. I can highly recommend it to you (and everyone else) to read.
LS
LS, I have read (skimmed actually, but I own them, so I will again) both the Gleeson books. I like Flyvbjerg, Hommels, L+M and Altshuler because they show the dirty side of transport/urban politics, funding and just plain inertia, that can’t be ignored. Flyvbjerg is much more fun outside class, if you like your politics (I do, so…).
McLoughlin is for Melbourne readers, to see how little progress planning in Victoria has made in 20 years. Garreau, Bogart and Levine are at the nexus of land use, economics and transport which I think is the best place to be. I highly recommend the Levine; I haven’t read a clearer discussion of the relationship between transport and density. The Shoup and Brown-May are interesting perspectives from the street level, if anyone has an interest in social transport policy.
Russ, another book on my particular area of interest (the transport planning/urban planning/economic planning nexus) that I would add is the slim volume in the ‘Briefings’ series by Jago Dodson and Neil Sipe Shocking the Suburbs: oil vulnerability in the Australian city. This extends the work they’ve done on the VAMPIRE index of the economic stress caused to households by concurrent rises in interest rates and petrol prices to the more general issue of re-building Australian cities to deal with the increase in petrol prices.
LS
Might not have much of a spare summer but will be reading Eleven Minutes Late: A train journey to the soul of Britain.
Might be time to write something too. My wife is vanity pressing her work at some point in the near future (with my encouragement). I have no formal background in urban planning (but some in transport planning) and there are far better authors at both topics than me.
But I would like to see a work that caters to the view that ‘more of the same’ ain’t gonna work – more rent seeking, more splashing of taxpayers money, more path of least resistance policy development – will not produce a situation different from what we have now with policy gridlock and discredited institutions.
So I might have to write it myself.
I was going to do a review of the Gleeson book for this board.
Not overly impressed – particularly not with the conclusion (you know the one, Peter Parker!) where we are all brought together for this giant group hug and all our social differences are forgotten.
Dreadlocked lentil eating lefties are supposed to come out from Northcote or Newtown on their bicycles to the suburbs and see how people live, empathise with them blah blah blah. And the favour is supposed to be returned (I don’t know how).
Society will not change because of group hugs. People have valid, conflicting interests (hence the presence of markets and elections). People need to fight for their interests.
And I’m only half joking when I’ve said it would be good if PCs could run on the energy generated from keyboard strokes – mine would run for a good many hours and so would much of our cities from the friction that living in a city or society generates.
And cities exist because of economic spatial efficiency (at the point where congestion begins to threaten that efficiency). Not because humans fundamentally like each other.
Riccardo,
Thanks for the comments. I think the strength of the Gleeson book is that it recognises that essentially, most Australians come from the suburbs and that if ‘we’ (especially those of us who live in the inner suburbs of our cities) leave those in the middle and outer suburbs who have no hope of escaping to rot, then the existing social and economic polarisation will sharpen and further deteriorate.
Generational welfare dependence and public housing stigmatised as the housing of last resort is not acceptable to me: by the same token, neither are homeless people living under freeways and railway viaducts and the incarceration of the poor and ignorant. Both will increase the tax burden on the predominantly middle-class tax base, but a humanist intervention to alleviate disadvantage and ignorance would cost less in taxes in the long run.
Anyway, good luck with trying to write your book. Having written a fair bit for a living, it’s not an easy job.
LS
I’ll add one more – it has no ISBN:
Australia’s Transport Crisis Edited by John Wilkes, Australian Institute of Political Science, 1956.
Notch, a good historical choice that one, coming in as it did on the heels of two major rail reports of 1956 – the Government members report into gauge standardisation (the ‘Wentworth Report’) and the Labor Party’s rail gauge standardisation report.
I’d suggest anyone looking for some summer rail reading track down the relevant Parliamentary Papers in either the State Library or major University library and have a read.
LS