Books and magazines about urbanism, architecture, city culture and travel. I hope one day to write some notes of all of these and build a "knowledge garden". Message me if you would like to borrow any of these :)
> *This is a work-in-progress!* It's just an info dump of titles now, eventually, I'll have pretty pictures and such.
# Europe
- The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs: Hatherley
- Borough-by-borough writing.
- Smooth City, Boer
- Really interesting read challenging the "sanitisation" of cities.
- Arkitektur, Nr. 6 2014
- (in Swedish) A Swedish architecture magazine. Found in the back halls of a bookshop in Malmö, 2024. Pretty pictures and random projects
- ESP (Esperanto) Culture, Issue 1
- An Experimental Jetset publication. Think it changed name at some point.
- Glory, Issue 10 "Scotland"
- Magazine about football culture
- Ark Journal XI
- Copenhagen-based design magazine.
- Nytt Rom, Issue 97
- (in Norwegian) interiors magazine.
- The Modernist, North 50
- Manchester-based architecture design magazine
- Slanted 39, "Stockholm"
- German biannual on design. Useful few pages of travel guide on Stockholm in the back!
- The New Era 01
- Scandinavian interiors magazine.
- The New Era 04
- Desired Landscapes 06
- Mini-magazine out of Athens. Some theory, some travel guide.
- B magazine 88: Copenhagen
- B magazine 43: Berlin
- Englisch in Berlin: Hilal and Varatharajah
- A book from an Instagram live conversation about the use of English as a prestige language in Berlin.
- Brutalist Paris: Green, Wilson
- Cereal Guide to Copenhagen
- "Looking cool"-focused travel guide
- Guide to New Architecture in Copenhagen
- Published by the Danish Architecture Centre, mostly modern stuff.
- LOST iN Frankfurt
- They have a whole series of guides for cities all around the world.
# North America
> This section needs more!
- Next New York: El Khafif and McDowell
- Lots of essays and pretty pictures on New York City.
- Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, Banham
- Derided by academics in the 70s. [Read this too](https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/233589/reyner-banham-s-los-angeles-the-architecture-of-four-ecologies)
- New York: city-pick: Reyes
- A collection of quotes about New York City.
# Asia
- Monocle Guide to Tokyo 3
- Monocle Guide to Singapore 11
- Wallpaper* Guide to Osaka
- Whole series of super colourful and compact city guides, not sure how out-of-date these have become though.
- CITIx60 Tokyo
- Creative-focused travel guide.
- Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World: Mostafavi, Ota
- Found this absolute tome in Readings Carlton. Lots of really interesting drawings in here!
- Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore: No 271 (Jäggi, Malterre-Barthes)
- Modern Architecture in Japan: Tafuri (Mostafavi editor)
- Emergent Tokyo: Almazàn, Studiolab
- A typology of patterns of neighbourhoods in Tokyo.
- Tokyo Metabolising: Kitayama, Tsukamoto, Nishizawa
- Found at the amazing Nanyodo Books.
- d design travel 16 Kyoto
- Travel guide located in Daikanyama T-SITE. Very limited parts in English.
- d design travel 13 Fukuoka
- The Passenger "Japan"
- New magazine popping up around shelves in Aus. Half travel writing, half travel guide.
- Takumen (??)
- (in Japanese) Located somewhere in Japan years ago, exclusively about ramen but I can't read any of it. I dream of one day being able to find one of the bowls in here.
- a+u 21:09 (612) Urban Science and New Design Tools
- Some really cool urban data science stuff in here.
- IDEA Magazine: 296-2003 "Books preposition graphic design"
- Really old Japanese design magazine.
- Ando: Jodidio
- I have the small one, there's a big coffee-table version. I hope to tick off all of these buildings one day.
# Australia
- Monocle Guide to Sydney 13
- Monocle Guide to Melbourne 31
- Urban Choreography: Dovey, Adams, Jones
- A history of the development of Central Melbourne
- Keeping Up Appearances El Khouri
- Found at a book fair in Pearl Beach, NSW. I can find very little about it online but it's incredibly interesting. It's a demographic study of Australia at the time of the Cronulla riots, challenging many of the claims that Australia (or Sydney) was "majority Anglo-Saxon", and basically asking what "Australian" means.
- Killing Sydney: Farrelly
- I really need to finish reading this.
- Transit Life: Bissell
- Essays focused on the life of commuters, mostly based in Greater Sydney and its regions.
- Quarterly Essay 89 "The Wires that Bind", Griffith
- Design Anthology, Issue 4, Australian edition
- Day Trip Sydney
- Cool little travel guide on bits of Sydney.
# General urbanism
- Superstructures: Experimental Jetset
- A City is not a Computer: Mattern
- Writing about over-"science"-ing cities.
- B "The Neighbourhood"
- There's a few others of these too. *The Home*, *The Shop*. Same folks as B Magazine.
# Architecture and interiors
- Apartamento 31
- Never Too Small: Chee, Beath, Price
- Small footprint interiors, inspired by the amazing YouTube channel.
- Twenty Houses by Twenty Architects, Pall Mall
- Modern Architecture: Frampton
- One day I will read this and resist the urge to get an architecture degree.
- Massive, Expressive, Sculptural: Brutalism Now and Then, van Uffelen
- Got this as a gift! I hope one day to tick off all of these buildings.
- The Apartment House
# Art & design
- Dot-Font: Talking about Fonts: Berry
- A bunch of blog posts, published.
- Dot-Font: Talking about Design: Berry
- B magazine 37: Tsutaya
- B magazine 60: Monocle
- B magazine 53: MUJI
- B magazine 35: Helvetica
- The Making of MONA
- Graphic Design School
- The Designer's Dictionary of Type: Adams
- Working with Computer Type: Books, Magazines, Newsletters
- How to...: Michael Bierut
- The Elements of Typographic Style: Bringhurst
- So incredibly detailed and wonderful.
- The Layout Look Book
- Thinking with Type: Lupton
- Like Bringhurst but with more pictures.
- The Design of Everyday Things: Norman
- What's a [Norman door](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-know-whether-push-pull-blame-design/)?
- IKEA the Book, Bengtsson
- Found this in a second-hand in Dulwich Hill. IKEA designs, most of which you can't buy anymore.
# Other
- Multilingualism: A Very Short Introduction, Maher (Oxford)
- Finnish Lessons: Sahlberg
- A book about the Finnish education system.