Plan on Reading These Books in 2025

Although improving traffic safety is the top stated priority of the federal and many state departments of transportation, the U.S. has the highest traffic fatality rate of its wealthy democratic peers. In 88 short, punchy chapters, Wes Marshall — a licensed professional engineer and civil engineering professor — provides plenty of evidence of how, rather than science, the traffic engineering profession relies on a host of manuals and practices developed on shaky research or pure conjecture over the past century. He likens contemporary traffic engineering to the early days of medicine when doctors and other practitioners likely killed as many patients as they saved.

By tracing a host of practices, Marshall convincingly shows that much of what traffic engineers claim improves safety is uncertain, contested, and synonymous with increasing capacity. I highly recommend it for anyone who cares about traffic safety or wants examples of how poor practices can become embedded in the daily practices of institutions.

Read the full JAPA review by Erick Guerra, University of Pennsylvania.

In Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond takes a broad and complex issue and attempts to distill it into a concise message. In short, Desmond argues that poverty persists because we all benefit from it. While this is not a new argument, he updates evidence of the degradation of jobs at the low end of the labor market and the ways people experiencing poverty — particularly Black Americans — are preyed upon and overpay for essential items like housing and access to cash and credit. Government is part of the problem — and so is the growing aversion that many U.S. residents have to use services we associate with the underserved, which reinforces resistance to investing in it.

Desmond proposes bold solutions and his arguments are particularly relevant for planners. This ambitious book is ultimately about building a new narrative about poverty, our role in it, and our obligation to act as a powerful diagnosis of our complicity in maintaining poverty.

Read the full JAPA review by Elizabeth Mueller, University of Texas at Austin.

One of the ways planning differs from other task-oriented professions is in how it learns from success and failure. As in previous books, Bent Flyvbjerg encourages urban planners, project managers, and the agencies that fund large-scale projects to be more realistic in their goals, cautious in their projections, and humble in their methods.

Drawing on past and present-day projects — ranging from Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow Airport and high-speed rail in California to an initially modest home renovation in Brooklyn that ended up costing six times the estimate — Flyvbjerg and Gardner deliver a series of concise lessons on how to improve the odds of undertaking successful projects. They show readers that the most important tools in any project management toolkit are experience, a healthy skepticism of optimistic forecasts and the latest-and-greatest technologies, an ability to manage teams, and an understanding of risk sources.

Read the full JAPA review by John Landis, University of Pennsylvania.

Narrated as an epic novel, impeccably researched, and richly rendered, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America takes a much-deserved place among planning history classics. It is a masterfully comprehensive account of intertwining the personal and landscape biographies of 19th-century American reformists, their social visions of communitarianism and social coexistence, and their mixed attempts at prototyping them. Far from being old-fashioned, distant stories, Cheng extracts from the past critical lessons for today's planners related to epistemology, representation, standardization, communication, authorship, and responsibility for planning choices.

Read the full JAPA review by Deni Ruggeri, University of Maryland.