Towards a Utopian Urban Interchange

When I first began running the University of Louisville’s Urban Design Studio (UDS), I had always envisioned it to be a place for idea generation and action. One day a few months into my new position as director, I came across a xeroxed working paper from 1966 by Grady Clay called The Utopian Urban Interchange. Finding this document was particularly impactful to me because I attribute my interest in pursuing an urban planning degree to Grady’s radio commentary series called Crossing the American Grain that I would listen to on the local NPR station, WFPL, while driving to work at the ad agency.

In the pre-internet working paper, Grady predicted our information-connected world and how “such tools will soon be in many people’s hands.” However, he contemplates the importance of a centralized data-bank and research center that is a physical location for human interaction and learning in Louisville. It was this document that I used as a guide for my vision of the UDS.

Through all of our different outreach and engagement programs over the years, like the Sustainable City Series, Society of Urban Perambulators, Open Studios and a variety of other workshops and events, we have worked and continue to grow the UDS as a place for community interaction, ideation and shared learning. 

Yet one facet I’ve always wanted to develop, but which has been elusive, is an urbanist reading room with all the great urban planning and design books that have shaped the profession, cities, and myself. Essentially providing a place that serves as a hub of knowledge for people to explore and become inspired, fostering a deeper understanding of how cities work, and building a common vocabulary to expand our communities' understanding of how to improve our city and why.

Recently we have had the fortune to begin building a solid foundation of a library and realize the urbanist reading room. Through a combination of scouring new and used books and some donated from my own collection, we now have close to 140 titles (see list below) embodying urban design’s interdisciplinary fields of architecture, planning, landscape architecture, ecology, sociology and more. 

There are the essential classics like Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Allan Jacobs’ Great Streets, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space to name a few. 

I thought I had tracked down a copy of Grady Clay’s Alleys, a Hidden Resource, a great book that chronicles some alleys in Louisville and even more meaningful to me because it was the source of a walking tour my friend and fellow urbanist Branden Klayko and I perambulated with WFPL reporters Gabe Bullard and Devin Katayama, retracing Grady’s steps. Unfortunately, the book was not available, likely a fake retailer account.

We have a good selection of essential contemporary titles as well, like Jan Gehl’s Cities for People, Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia's Tactical Urbanism, Charles Marohn’s Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Douglas Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope, and Janette Sadik-Khan’s Streetfight.

I made sure to incorporate a good mix of technical tomes like Dhiru Thadani’s The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual DIctionary, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Matthew Carmona’s Public Places Urban Spaces, Randolph Hester’s Design for Ecological Democracy, and Daniel Parolek’s Form Based Codes.

As I look through the books we have collected, I’m still trying to figure out how to make the books available beyond reading them at the UDS, but first and foremost, we want to use the library to create a dynamic space that fosters community engagement and builds a vibrant network of urban design professionals and enthusiasts. 

When the new UDS space is built at UofL’s Envirome Institute, it will be situated in a park space connected to the New Vision of Health Campus currently under construction. The vision is a welcoming space where urbanists can gather to read, discuss, and tackle the issues facing our city… as a community, always working towards Grady’s Utopian Urban Interchange.

Below is a list of all the books we have collected so far. What other books are we missing?

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