Messy Cities

Would our cities be more lively, more liveable, if we broke the rules more often?

Crowded streets, sidewalk vendors, jumbled architecture, constant clamor, graffitied walls, parks gone wild: are these signs of a poorly managed city or indicators of urban vitality?

With pieces on guerrilla gardening, facadism, queer ecology, and decolonizing public engagement written by experts from all walks of life, Messy Cities makes the case for embracing disorder while not shying away from confronting its challenges.

Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything argues that messiness is not a liability but an essential element in all thriving cities. Forty essays by a range of writers from around the world illuminate the role of messy urbanism in enabling creativity, enterprise, and grassroots initiatives to flourish within dense modern cities.

AUTHOR

Zahra Ebrahim

Ken Greenberg is an urban designer, teacher, and writer, whose passion and advocacy for the city over the past decades has involved him in virtually every aspect of its remarkable transformation. He lives in Toronto.

AUTHOR

Dylan Reid

John Lorinc is a journalist and editor. He writes regularly about cities, climate, and planning for a range of media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Corporate Knights, Walrus, and Spacing Magazine, where he is senior editor. John is the author of four previous books, including The New City (Penguin, 2006), and Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias (Coach House Books, 2022), which won the Writers’ Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy and the Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award. He has also contributed to, co-edited, or project managed every volume of Coach House’s uTOpia series, including The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Nieghbourhood and House Divided: How the Missing Middle Can Solve Toronto’s Affordability Crisis. John lives with his wife, Victoria Foote, and their labrador retriever, Nora, in Toronto. They have two sons, Jacob and Sammy. Away from his laptop, John is an enthusiastic but untalented hockey player and once (but never again) co-produced a musical cabaret about local history.

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Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

300 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in * 0in
10gr

Published:

June 03, 2025

Publisher:

Coach House Books

ISBN:

9781552455036

Book Subjects:

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Urban

Language:

eng

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