Introduction:
This blog is an intellectual exercise. I've been reading extensively on cities and city planning, and I feel that writing about them with descriptions, and analysis will cement knowledge in my mind, and hone writing skills that have languished this past year since I finished my B.A. And, since I live in Austin, I'll try to apply the readings to the city. So, for the book I read on Los Angeles (below), I compare the two cities, and hopefully find more dissimilarities than similarities.
Posts will take one of two forms. Every Tuesday and Friday, a big post on the book I'm reading. And periodically, hopefully several times a week, they'll be posts on relevant issues to Austin. If, for instance, I had started this blog last week, there would be a post about the TODs along the Red Line.
I've been reading for a while, so here are summaries of the books I've already read.

The Life and Death of Great American Cities – Jane Jacobs
This is the seminal text of urban planning, and the title that drew me to the field. I ran across it in an article I read for my eminent domain work, which it condemns (as it were) in very harsh terms. Written in 1962, the book was a polemic against the urban planners of the day. Urban renewal plans of the 1950's and 1960's focused on tearing down blighted communities and replacing them with big single use buildings, like office buildings and housing projects. The projects were designed according to Le Courbusier's radiant city ideas: tall buildings surrounded by open grass and streets were supposed to make for an attractive city. Such ideas spawned projects like Cabrini Green and other slums; Jacobs rightfully attacked them for fostering crime and poverty.
She also attacked big office buildings downtown; since the workers they brought to town left as soon as 5 o'clock hit, she argued they added nothing to the value of downtown. Instead, she argued for diversity: downtown buildings with office, retail and housing space. (Which Austin is trying to create with the condos and the 2nd street shopping district, among other projects.)
Jane Jacobs lived in New York, and many of her insights, though substantiated by other examples, come from the positive experience of her neighborhood. This can be kind of irritating, but its the still the foundational book of planning, and it will come up many more times. Accordingly, I'm not going to elaborate with respect to Austin beyond the brief note on 2nd street and condos.

The Reluctant Metropolis – William Fulton
The mechanics of Los Angeles are somewhat terrifying. I've always wondered why a city of such size arose in a desert with no water and no harbor, and no discernable core. Los Angeles was engineered by a cabal of real estate planners. They tricked and bullied the rest of Southern California for water rights and then sold the city as rural and idyllic to attract people seeking lots of land and a nice climate. Los Angeles' economy was urban sprawl: the more people came, the farther away from the center they settled and homebuilding was the biggest industry. And LA county was big, and freeway money was plentiful, so this expansion never really stopped.
Unfortunately, all the suburbs incorporated as different towns, diffused power through the entire region, making the region almost entirely ungovernable. No good public transportation, no effective water sharing plan, no cultural center (the Walt Disney center was unfinished and millions of dollars over budget when the book was written – it was a prime example of the city's failures) and a host of other urban problems resulted. A collection of towns that saw themselves as independent led to a “reluctant metropolis” lacking identity and unity.
Austin, happily, has a core identity built around the Capital and the University of Texas. And the music scene establishes a cultural identity for the city in a way that Hollywood can't for Los Angeles. The book made me happy, because even though Austin continues to sprawl, it will never turn into L.A.

Mega Projects – Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff
This book was essentially Downtown Inc. about highways, airports and convention centers. It kept referencing Downtown Inc. and said essentially the same things, so I read Downtown Inc. instead.

Downtown Inc.
This is an awesome book. It was written in 1990 and concerns the struggle to renew downtowns eviscerated by suburban malls and failed urban renewal projects. The book focuses on four projects: Faneuil Hall in Boston, Horton Plaza in San Diego, Pike Place in Seattle, and Town Square in St. Paul. All of these successfully adopted the idea of a suburban shopping mall but made it work within a city's character to establish city landmarks that bring people back to downtown. It made me happy, because I like downtowns, and it illustrates what urban planning can accomplish with creativity and persistence. Downtown Inc. is the opposite of the book I'm currently reading, Edge City, and I'll discuss it at greater length next post when I discuss Edge City.