Building Better Cities - Stories, strategies, and practices

A city is something we make, whether we notice it or not. It emerges from the daily choices and relationships of the people who live inside it. We are not passive residents of a finished product. We are its ongoing architects – if we decide to act like it.

Building Better Cities is a grounded synthesis of more than five years and 450+ conversations from the What is The Future for Cities? podcast. Architect and future of cities researcher Fanni Melles, PhD draws together what researchers, practitioners, policymakers, designers, entrepreneurs and residents have taught us about how cities actually work – and how they could work better.

This is not a technical manual for planners. It is not a utopian blueprint. It does not catalogue decline. It is a book about conscious urban evolution: treating cities as complex, living systems, then taking part in them with clearer eyes.

The book moves in two arcs.

• Dangerous memes – ideas that quietly steer urban thinking off course: technology as an end in itself, “sustainability” as preservation of the status quo, degrowth that fears innovation, bureaucracy, “we’ve always done it this way,” fatalism about past mistakes, and the story that we are doomed.
• Foundations – a more useful posture: antifragility, better governance, economic expansion, energy abundance, technology as applied knowledge, the built environment, transport, nature, food-producing cities, residents as architects, and even space cities.

You can read it in order or go straight to the section that matches your work. Each major section ends with questions meant to be used – at a desk, in a studio, in a council meeting, or at a kitchen table.

Who it is for: planners, designers, policymakers, researchers, community organisers, and anyone who cares about the future of the place they live.

The future of our cities is still open. This book is an invitation to meet it as the architects we already are.