![]() If you’re not yet outraged, prepare to be. ![]() If you’re already outraged at the state of traffic safety in the United States, Confessions is the perfect book for informing yourself and others to make a change. The comparison can be taken a step further: Confessions promises to take position next to Right of Way ( Top Planning Books 2020), the High Cost of Free Parking ( Top Planning Books 2006) and Walkable City ( Top Planning Books of the 2010s) as the essential planning texts for resisting automobile dominance. Marohn’s skills in making planning and engineering jargon relatable-with anecdote, metaphor, and rhetoric-are paralleled only by Donald Shoup. Marohn has also been penalized for calling that dogma into question, which adds to the intrigue. Marohn has been on the other side of these equations, following the doctrine (dogma) of a profession that obstinately refuses to acknowledge the costs, in lives, of its single mindedness. ![]() Part of the genius of Confessions is its air of whispered exposé, or the clandestine document of a whistleblower. As Charles Marohn reveals in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, the choices (planning, engineering, and political) behind the dominant mode of transportation in the United States are more magical thinking than miracle. All that car traffic, moving all the time, might seem like a miracle. Most Americans go their whole lives without sparing a single thought for the formulas and measurements of traffic control. The Top Urban Planning Books of 2021 Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town Any big titles that just missed the window will be considered for next year's list. All books on this list were published between roughly September 2020 and September 2021, although there is at least one exception on the edges of that range (and likely will be next year too). The Planetizen team met in October and November 2021 to make final selections for this list according to the same selection criteria that guided similar " Top Books" lists from years past ( 20 were both great years for planning books, in case you're still looking to catch up as the pandemic lingers into yet another new year). Those books will require more patience, just like so much else of the experience of surviving COVID-19.īut the lack of a definitive pandemic planning tome does not mean that 2021 didn’t offer plenty of reading material for improving our skills as humans and planners both during and after the pandemic. Eventually this pandemic will be endemic, and many books will emerge with the brilliant planning analysis we’ve all craved for nearly 21 months now. Barry and A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit come to mind. In the books that follow, we see the pandemic mentioned in forewords and afterwords, or sprinkled in here and there, but if you’re looking for ambitious non-fiction to help wrap your head around the consequences of this unfolding moment in history, you’ll probably still need to reference books that predate the novel Coronavirus- The Great Influenza by John M. Still to come also, it seems, is a definitive text about the pandemic and its effects on the field of planning. ![]() But the world is still waiting to discover the long-term effects of the pandemic, and with so much focus currently on the global supply chain, gas prices, and endemicity (rather than herd immunity), many of the worst fears of spring 2020 still seem in play. While 2020 was full of apprehension and uncertainty, 2021 seems more likely to come to be defined by hope giving way to disappointment. We've arrived at the end of another pandemic year.
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