How to Make a City: Urban Planning Publications
“A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.”
― Leon Krier, The Architecture of Community
Cities are complicated. Leon Krier, author of The Architecture of Community, believes they are not accidental but "planned" with varying degrees of success.
What is Planning?
Planning is a complex, multi-disciplinary subject area. 'Urban planning' replaced the term 'city planning' as the discipline grew. Broadly speaking, planning is concerned with all aspects of land use, the environment, design of urban space, public works and infrastructure.
Planning covers municipal governance, finance, transit and transportation, housing, and social welfare. Public works includes civil engineering, water supply, water treatment and sewage, garbage and recycling, and more. Architecture and urban design, urban renewal and community development are components of the urban planning field as well.
Our Urban Planning Publications
We hold a major collection of city planning documents, urban planning books, reports, and maps at the Toronto Reference Library. But did you know that we also have a substantial collection of current and historical urban planning publications?
To put forth these "coherent visions and aims", professional planners, engineers, architects, consultants and others publish results of their research and analysis in professional magazines, newsletters, academic journals, as well as in-house publications put out by non-profit associations and private firms.
Often called "periodicals", we have Canadian, American and European titles in print, microform and electronic versions.
How Can We Find These In The Library?
- Keep your searches simple. To search for periodicals in our catalogue, you can use keywords in the search box (e.g planning Canada).
- Keywords include city planning, regional planning, land use, cities, towns, urban policy, urban ecology, urban renewal, urbanization, transportation, transit, and public works.
- Take a look at the left hand sidebar. It will give you all of the areas that you can limit.
- Limit your search further by Branch (Toronto Reference Library), by Type (Magazines, Newspapers and Journals) and other limits such as dates, subjects and so forth.
Most of the planning journals are on the second floor, Humanities and Social Sciences Department, but some topics are on other floors.
Sampling of Canadian, American and European Titles: 
SPACING
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE;
LA REVUE CANADIENNE DES SCIENCE REGIONALES
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH
To re-cap:
- Check our catalogue;
- Keep your search simple;
- Limit your searches with the categories listed along the left side of the page.
Or pay us a visit in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department and let us help you "plan" your search.
6 thoughts on “How to Make a City: Urban Planning Publications”
nice
useful information.
Well written articles and very educative.
Hi, there: Glad you’ve discovered our Toronto Reference Library blogs. Feel free to pass them on.
Very educative
Really nice article! Everythingexplained very well. Maybe you can add few more articles about smart cities and how they are data driven. Use of data for companies will also add to the quality to this content. I would like to recommend further reading about Data Processing Cycle on https://planningtank.com/computer-applications/data-processing-cycle
& https://planningtank.com/computer-applications/information-processing-cycle