Five Great Books I Read in 2025

This year, I found myself drawn to non-fiction more than ever. Maybe it was joining the Ottawa Urbanism Book Club or simply craving a deeper understanding of cities, but in any case, I managed to get 23 books under my belt so far this year. And so I thought I would share five books that shaped my thinking, challenged my assumptions, or simply captivated me this year. This isn’t a definitive “best of” list for everyone, but it’s a personal record of the works that left a mark on me.

1. You’ll Pay for This by Michel Durant-Wood

I first discovered Michel Durant-Wood through his brilliant blog, Dear Winnipeg, which critiques–in his characteristically humorous way–Winnipeg municipal politics through an infrastructure and municipal finance lens, à la Strong Towns. I actually met him this year at the Strong Towns National Gathering in Rhode Island. It’s there that I not only learned that he’s a fellow French Canadian but also that he had recently published a book. I ordered it as soon as I got home and read it in a day, which sounds impressive until you realize it’s a 145-page pocket-sized book. At my local book club, someone called it “the longest blog post I’ve ever read,” which is precisely its strength. He somehow managed to make municipal finance–a topic that barely excites most accountants–feel urgent and accessible.

It’s the most approachable “Strong Towns” book out there. Wood brilliantly boils down the whole concept of why the post-war development pattern is so financially insolvent/unsustainable. And he does it right away in the first chapter through a powerful anecdote. He talks about Elmwood Park, a local park in Winnipeg. He mentions that before the postwar sprawl, the city could afford a full-time gardener who planted 1,200 flowers every year. The park was so beautiful that it was featured on postcards, and locals regularly used it to take wedding photos. After the ’60s, that gardener’s position was cut. Winnipeg entered a slow spiral of “tough choices” and service cuts, and today, like most cities in the US and Canada, it can’t even keep up with potholes. Why? The city no longer generates enough surplus from its tax base to fully fund operations and capital needs. It’s a simple yet powerful story that reflects a pattern we see everywhere.

Wood shows there are no simple solutions, and that our cities face a systemic predicament that will require us to weather the many challenges ahead. The book left me yearning for a day where budget season can come around without it being plagued with grim phrases like “we need to find balance, no budget is perfect, we all have to make difficult decisions”, and instead be a season of excitement, imagination, and abundance. Perhaps that dream, and the ambition to pursue it, are more powerful than any single policy framework for bringing about change.

2. Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World by Alan Mallach

In a world of shrinking rates of economic growth, declining birth rates, climate instability, and worsening geopolitical conditions, it would be foolish to pin our hopes for better cities on growth alone. Alan Mallach’s Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World looks back at history and tries to piece together the ingredients that explain why some cities thrived in a shrinking economic and demographic context, and why some only decayed further. The insights he draws offer a roadmap for how our cities can stay ahead of the curve and become resilient in the face of adversity.

I really enjoyed reading this book, especially after the year I spent in Berlin in 2023. While there, I often took the high-speed train an hour south to Leipzig, a city still visibly recovering from post-reunification deindustrialization. Abandoned buildings and a lively anarchist squatting scene spoke of decline, yet the city felt unmistakably vibrant–so much so that it’s often called “the better Berlin.” Leipzig is a city that shrank but didn’t decay. Its resilience is partly due to its historic built form: the Mietkasernen, or “rent barracks”–connected single-stair apartment buildings of 4–6 stories. This compact, affordable housing stock made the city attractive for artists and students, while also giving the city a financially solvent infrastructure base–allowing it to rebound and provide high-quality services to residents.

Mallach’s book helped me better understand why cities like Detroit struggled with decline far more than places like Leipzig, or cities in Latvia or Japan. Mallach argues that resilience isn’t about reversing decline, but about adapting gracefully–using legacy infrastructure wisely, embracing flexibility, and focusing on quality of life over growth. It made me reflect on the variety of factors that lead to maximizing a city’s resiliency, things like investing in diverse local systems: food, manufacturing, energy, social capital, and financially sustainable transportation, to name a few. It’s really a great read for anyone curious about what planning for resilience actually looks like, and why, in an uncertain world, it’s a wise and sensible way forward.

3. Building for People by Michael Eliason

I’ve followed architect Michael Eliason on Twitter (and now his Bluesky) for years, watching his single-stair reform advocacy gain real policy traction. To this day, I’m still quite baffled as to how an issue like single stair building code reform went from being something almost no one had heard of to the newfound hot urbanist gospel. It seems like in a matter of months we all became “stair-pilled”–a play on the now famous “orange-pilled” expression that arose from the Not Just Bike YouTube phenomenon. After lots of encouragement, Michael published a book that goes much beyond showcasing the powerful impacts of legalizing single-stair buildings.

Building for People asks us a us to think about what our cities would look like if our planning process was, well, a bit more planned… What would happen if instead of planning primarily through exclusion, we built our cities with the goal of ensuring that climate adaptability, livability, sustainable mobility, public health, and quality of life were front and center? It’s an exciting read, filled (in true architect fashion) with powerful visualizations, images, and sketches that really make you rethink how something as simple as staircases, minimum setbacks, and building depth can have drastic downstream consequences on livability and affordability.

I was especially glad to see Europe’s largest eco-district featured: Vienna’s Seestadt Aspern, which I visited twice now! It’s a completely new high-density family-friendly housing development built on a former airport. It offers a mix of social, public, co-op, and private housing, integrated along the extension of a metro line, all while ensuring daily needs can be met by active transportation. When I first visited Seestadt Aspern, I kept puzzling over why this type of development is essentially non-existent back home. Well, if you want to know why, this is the book for you. Michael outlines the essential ingredients for creating well-designed, walkable eco-districts, covering everything from planning and public engagement to zoning and building codes. This book is both a diagnosis of what holds us back and a visual guide to what we could build instead.

4. The Shoup Doctrine edited by Daniel Baldwin Hess

This collection of essays–an increasingly popular format in the non-fiction urbanist genre, exemplified by works like Messy Cities and House Divided, which I also highly recommend–expands on the work of the late Donald Shoup in a way that’s both rigorous and remarkably accessible . The book features contributions from 37 planners, economists, and journalists, who all have a special relationship with Shoup or Parking Reform. As someone immersed in this work at PRN, I loved the deep dive. It’s not an introductory text; it’s for Shoupistas and policy wonks. It really does feature all the heavy hitters in the field, and you are guaranteed to get an overview of every aspect of parking reform theory, policy, and history, as well as four insightful biographical essays on Shoup himself detailing his journey as the pioneer of parking reform research.

I have to say, my favorite part—though I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m just flattering my boss Tony—is his essay, “From Theory to Practice: Building a Movement to Implement Shoup’s Ideas.” It opens with this unforgettable exchange:

“Donald Shoup once asked me what I thought when I read The High Cost of Free Parking. I told him I felt like I was eating a hamburger in 1906 while paging through The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s exposé of meatpacking plants. I was shocked.”

When Tony first told me about this, I had to admit I wasn’t part of the Greatest Generation, so the Upton Sinclair reference sailed right over my head. But the analogy stuck with me. That moment of shock when you realize that something you used to see in a certain light is now flipped on its head is such a fundamental experience I’ve had ever since I started being interested in urbanism. When I walk the streets these days, all I can see is the high cost of free parking all around me. I can’t help but think of staircases when I see those deep new apartment buildings. I can’t help seeing the damage exclusionary zoning caused when I drive through the suburbs and see all those stroads and car-dependent single-family homes.

Perhaps a more generationally relevant analogy (also one that Tony shared with me) is from the film They Live: much like the protagonist, played by Roddy Piper, who puts on special glasses and suddenly sees the world as it truly is, run by alien overlords, I can’t look at a parking lot anymore without seeing essentially a pile of burning cash representing all the ways our cities could be made better if we didn’t constantly prioritize cars over people.

5. The Unfinished Metropolis by Benjamin Schneider

If you loved the narrative and anecdote-filled journey of Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise, you’ll definitely find a kindred spirit in journalist Benjamin Scheider’s The Unfinished Metropolis. Scheiner, like all great journalists, masterfully manages to unravel the often technical policy wonk world of urban planning into a story that’s easy to digest for everyone, yes, even for that skeptical relative you always see over the holidays.

His scope is broad, but for parking reformers, there’s a standout chapter, “Therapy for the Parking Panic”. The title is presumably a subtle nod to the pandemic-era revelation that “only the anxiety of sickness can compete with the anxiety of finding a parking spot.” A clear reference to the phenomenon in which cities across the world appropriated parking spots for outdoor dining and recreation, only for it to recede back into the domain of the car as the pandemic gradually dissipated. It’s a great chapter that offers an overview of the parking reform movement and the tangible ways cities have successfully pushed back against parking anxiety in the face of much-needed reforms.

But more importantly, Schneider does a great job contextualizing how our cities came to be the way they are. He doesn’t just list urban ills; he traces their origins through a clear-eyed historical analysis. He explains the forces that gave use, the scourge of stroads, the abomination that is the Texas Donut, the now (in)famous double-loaded five over one, and the retail apocalypse of dead malls sprinkled about our suburban areas. I really appreciated his ability to connect the dots, showing how decades of policy choices, economic shifts, and cultural assumptions have physically shaped the places we inhabit. And it’s precisely by showing how we got here that Schneider makes a powerful case that our cities aren’t finished products but are constantly changing. He makes it clear that it’s up to us to shape and mold our cities in a direction where mistakes of the past can be redeemed, and where future generations can look back with pride on the advocacy and progress we achieve today.

For even more book recommendations, be sure to check out our 2024 book recommendations and our president, Tony’s parking reform bookshelf, compiled back in 2020.