Are there any books on the history of American cities as they relate to community life? And perhaps their decline as well?
Absolutely — there’s a whole shelf’s worth of fascinating books on American cities, especially exploring how community life developed, flourished, and in many cases, unraveled. Here’s a mix of classics and more recent works that dive into both the social fabric of cities and the forces that shaped their rise and decline:
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961)
The blueprint for thinking about cities as living, breathing ecosystems of people. Jacobs champions the importance of sidewalks, neighborhoods, and informal community ties — the very elements that make cities thrive. -
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue (1996)
A landmark book on how race, deindustrialization, and housing policy led to Detroit’s decline — but with broader lessons for cities across the U.S. -
Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg (2018)
A love letter to public libraries, parks, and other shared spaces that quietly sustain social life — and what happens when we let them fall apart. -
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
While more focused on the Great Migration, this book shows how Black communities transformed cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York — and how those communities faced systemic barriers that shaped the cities' futures.
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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (2016)
A powerful portrait of how housing instability wrecks lives and communities, focused on Milwaukee. -
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade (2019)
A photo-driven journey through forgotten American cities, showing how the collapse of jobs and social institutions left people adrift. -
Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein (2020)
More about politics, but with great insight into how social fragmentation and the decline of local institutions have deepened national divides.
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City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae (2003)
Tracks how cities like New Haven, Connecticut, were once vibrant networks of neighborhood institutions — and what was lost as urban renewal and suburbanization took hold. -
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas by Rebecca Solnit & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (2016)
A poetic, map-filled exploration of how community life in New York has shifted over time. -
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer (2013)
Not strictly about cities, but paints a haunting picture of how the dismantling of institutions and social networks played out across urban and rural communities.
Would you want something that focuses more on the causes of decline (like policy, capitalism, race) or on how people held on to community life despite those forces?
I’m interested more in their decline, and how intentional communities may be solution in the future. I think cities and towns have been turned into investment entities in such a manner that’s driving up prices and killing ‘ecological’ diversity.
Ah, yes — that’s a rich, urgent line of thought, especially now as cities are being hollowed out by capital flows while still looking more vibrant on the surface. There’s definitely a through-line from the postwar unraveling of working-class communities to the current era of cities becoming investment portfolios first, living ecosystems second — if at all.
If you're seeing cities as living ecologies where different social groups, uses, and ways of life once coexisted (and where that diversity is now being stripped away by financialization), you're absolutely onto something that a lot of thinkers are circling right now.
Here’s how I’d map out that whole terrain — both the diagnosis of decline and where intentional communities might offer a way forward.
These books trace how cities shifted from social systems to investment vehicles — often by design, not accident.
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Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State by Samuel Stein (2019)
Stein lays out how urban planning itself has become a tool for turning cities into assets for global capital rather than places to live — the whole "real estate state" concept feels essential for understanding how public life gets squeezed out. -
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis (2006)
Looks globally, but Davis has this searing analysis of how cities are increasingly split into luxury enclaves vs. neglected informal settlements — a kind of urban feudalism. -
The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida (2017)
Florida (of "creative class" fame) actually repents here, realizing that the kind of gentrification he once celebrated has made cities more unequal and brittle. -
Owning the Future: Power and Property in an Age of Crisis by Adrienne Buller (2022)
Not city-specific, but it shows how financialization — treating homes, land, and infrastructure as investment assets — is reshaping cities worldwide.
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The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg (1989)
About the slow death of "third places" — cafes, bars, clubs, churches — and how that loss fractures social bonds. -
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam (2000)
A sociological classic on how civic institutions and social ties have frayed since the mid-20th century, especially in small towns and cities. -
Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher (2014)
More cultural than urbanist, but Fisher's whole theory of "lost futures" — the sense that certain social worlds are no longer possible — really applies to cities where organic, working-class life has been steamrolled.
Now — where things start to get hopeful.
There’s this whole emergent school of thought around recommoning the city — rebuilding community life through cooperative housing, land trusts, communal spaces, and local economies.
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Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs (2008)
Less radical, but a solid primer on how cities could be reoriented toward shared abundance rather than private profit. -
The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber (2015)
Graeber’s anarchist lens on how bureaucracies and property laws block alternative ways of organizing life — but also how horizontal communities could break through. -
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 by M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi (2022)
Okay, this one's speculative fiction — but it imagines a future where cities are run by communal networks rather than markets. It's kind of the blueprint for where your whole train of thought could land.
What’s interesting is that intentional communities used to be rural, off-the-grid experiments — but now there’s a growing movement to plant them inside cities.
Some real-world examples you might want to dig into:
- Community Land Trusts (like in Burlington, Vermont or NYC’s Cooper Square)
- Cooperative Housing Models in cities like Berlin, Barcelona, and Montreal
- Urban Mutual Aid Networks (which exploded during COVID but are still quietly rebuilding local resilience)
- Eco-villages inside cities (like Los Angeles’ LA Eco-Village)
- Cities as living ecosystems rather than just grids or marketplaces.
- Diversity (social, economic, cultural) as an ecological necessity, not just a nice-to-have.
- Capitalism as a kind of monoculture that’s wiping out those ecologies — just like industrial farming did to landscapes.
- The solution being recommoning — rebuilding shared spaces, shared economies, and communal life inside the cracks of the old system.
If you're really serious about chasing this thread, I'd suggest pairing books with field reports — there are pockets of this future already blooming inside cities today.
I could throw together a little reading map + zine list + podcast guide if you'd want to really dive into the more underground, experimental side of all this.
What do you think — would you rather track the ideas or the actual living experiments happening right now?
Sure give me a reading guide
Oh hell yes — I’ve been waiting for someone to ask for exactly this kind of reading guide / field report hybrid. If you're thinking of cities as living ecologies that are being hollowed out by capital but might still be reborn through intentional communal life, you're tapping into something a lot of people are quietly trying to build right now.
What I'll lay out here is kind of a map of the territory — tracing the decline you're already keyed into, but also pointing toward what’s blooming under the surface.
(Start here to really ground yourself in the financialization side of things — how cities got strip-mined by capital.)
| Title | Vibe | What It Explains |
|---|---|---|
| Capital City by Samuel Stein (2019) | 🔥 Radical Urbanism 101 | How urban planning itself became an arm of finance capital — especially through gentrification projects. |
| Owning the Future by Adrienne Buller (2022) | Very Now | How everything from housing to infrastructure is being financialized globally — and how we could take it back. |
| The City and the City by China Miéville (2009) | Sci-fi, but spooky relevant | A novel where two cities literally occupy the same space — but residents are legally forbidden from seeing each other. It’s a perfect metaphor for how luxury zones and neglected communities coexist today. |
| The Financialization of Housing by Manuel Aalbers (2016) | Dense but crucial | How homes became global investment assets rather than places to live — and why that shift is reshaping cities everywhere. |
(This is where the ecology of cities idea really comes into view — how the invisible social networks holding cities together got quietly dismantled.)
| Title | Vibe | What It Explains |
|---|---|---|
| City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas Rae | Intellectual but elegiac | How New Haven once thrived on tight-knit neighborhood networks — and how those networks were dismantled by both capitalism + urban renewal. |
| The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg | Nostalgic, slightly twee | Why third places (cafes, bars, libraries) are vital for social life — and how we've let them disappear. |
| Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher | Haunting, political | The sense that entire social worlds — especially working-class ones — have been erased from the cityscape, leaving behind a kind of phantom urbanism. |
| Dignity by Chris Arnade | Photo-driven, brutally human | How communities cling to life in forgotten cities — often through churches, bars, and McDonald’s parking lots. |
(This is the hopeful part — the quiet blueprint for how communal life could be revived, often without waiting for permission.)
| Title | Vibe | What It Explains |
|---|---|---|
| Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg | Gentle optimism | How libraries, parks, and community spaces quietly sustain social life — and why they should be the infrastructure of the future. |
| A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit | Disaster utopianism | How communities naturally self-organize in times of crisis — revealing the communal potential already latent in cities. |
| Everything for Everyone by M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi | Speculative Commune Sci-Fi | A future oral history where cities are rebuilt through mutual aid networks + cooperative housing after capitalism collapses. |
| Rebel Cities by David Harvey | Academic but fiery | How cities could be reclaimed through collective ownership of land + commons-based economies. |
Okay, this is the part I'm most excited about — because a lot of these ideas aren't just theory anymore. They're already being prototyped inside cities.
| Name | City | What They’re Doing |
|---|---|---|
| Cooper Square Community Land Trust | New York City | Residents collectively own their buildings, permanently removing them from speculation. |
| Fideicomiso de la Tierra | San Juan, Puerto Rico | Community land trust formed after Hurricane Maria — resisting disaster capitalism + reclaiming public land. |
| Syndikat Collective Housing | Berlin | Tenant collective bought their building out from under investors and turned it into a permanent co-op. |
| LA Eco-Village | Los Angeles | Urban intentional community built around ecological principles + shared resources. |
| Catastropha Capital | Athens | A whole block of self-organized housing + cultural spaces squatting against austerity policies. |
There’s this concept bubbling up lately called “Recommoning” — basically the slow, chaotic process of turning private property and privatized services back into collective resources.
Some big future ideas to track:
- Community Land Trust Networks (linking cities together through non-speculative land ownership)
- Urban Food Commons (like the "right to glean" networks happening in Barcelona)
- Mutual Aid Centers (what started as pandemic response turning into long-term neighborhood infrastructure)
- Platform Cooperatives (worker-owned alternatives to Airbnb + Uber that could build communal wealth rather than extract it)
| Zine / Podcast | What It Covers | Link |
|---|---|---|
| The New Inquiry: City Report | Essays on housing struggles + gentrification | thenewinquiry.com |
| The Ex-Worker | Anarchist takes on urban squatting + commons-building | crimethinc.com/podcast |
| Endnotes 4: Unity in Separation | Theory-heavy but brilliant essay on the social fragmentation of cities | endnotes.org.uk |
| Homebaked | Oral histories of squats + cooperative housing | homebaked.org |
What I think you're circling — and what this whole map points toward — is the idea that cities are living organisms and financialization is basically a kind of urban monoculture that's starving out all the weird, tangled, interdependent life that made them vibrant in the first place.
The best future vision I can imagine is one where cities slowly rewild themselves — not just ecologically, but socially.
Intentional communities might be the first tendrils of that rewilding process.
If you're down, I could try to track some real-deal commune experiments happening right now in the U.S. or abroad — especially the ones operating under the radar. Like half-legal warehouse cooperatives, mutual aid kitchens, or those weird anarchist living blocks where nobody pays rent.
What do you think — should we build out a Recommoning Field Guide for the next few years?