A great climate/sustainability reading list! Who doesn’t love one of those? While there are so many ideas floating around and out, I add to the cacophony (for once) and share the following that don't touch the topic directly but inform us about the subtle, inexorable power of the world, both human-made (urban infra, buildings, walkable cities, etc.) and natural (birdlife, trees, landscapes, etc.) around us at all times. A literary sustainability reading list, if you may!

When you think of a climate book what comes to mind is reams and reams of policywonking, nerding out about events like COP, WEF, and long rants about the carelessness of policymakers. This list includes none such books.

Like I said, these books don’t tackle the subject of climate or greening or sustainability (except maybe Gehl’s) but they give us that singular, humane perspective into what makes a place livable for humans, bird, large swathes of working class populations, etc. They remind us of the humanity in the everyday that we seem to be rapidly moving away from. They take us into vicissitudes of the urban ecosystems and what clicks where it does.

Anyone else writing this list will do it totally differently, and so don’t look at it as conclusive, decisive. Share with friends and tell me if you’re read any of these?

1. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern (2021)

Through history, personal experience and popular culture Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities enmeshed into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Design she writes is inherently biased against women, making cities unsustainable from the get go. Through this book, Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city. She tackles fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, alongside the joys and perils of being alone as a woman navigating a city. Kern maps the city from novel vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future.

• Subscribe to Kern’s substack: Perfectly Cromulent

2. The Life & Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961)

In prose of remarkable urgency, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe. She goes into the constituents of a neighborhood, and what function they serve within the larger organism of the city. My favourite bits are when she writes about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves — queue “eyes on streets”. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, this is a monumental work that provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

• In 2021, I wrote an essay about the Delhi lockdowns being reminiscent of Jacobs approach: Jane Jacobs and Delhi’s lockdowns

3. Low Life by Lucy Sante (1991)

Sante reveals the parts of the Lower East Side, one of New York’s oldest neighborhoods, through his insight into buildings, doorways and details that usually go unnoticed. Through their incandescent perspective the smaller picture comes immediately in view, suddenly sharply focused as a strange and vibrant life shows itself beneath the grime and residue of time. This is an electric literary enterprise that reveals that despite the fact that the city is the hub of all human endeavour, so much of it often goes unnoticed.

4. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2015)

This is one of those rare books that changed my outlook on life in a small, immovable way. It takes the format of a memoir blended with nature writing, and creates a humane, multi-layered set of pieces that detail her life after losing her father and dealing with the grief by raising and training a young goshawk. I could quote endlessly from this book but it’s a treasure and one of those I’d be coming back to very often.

• This was made into a “major motion picture” where Claire Foy essayed Macdonald. Makes for spectacular viewing experience: H is for Hawk.

5. Cities for People by Jan Gehl (2010)

Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, the Danish urbanist and architect emphasizes four human issues that he sees as essential to successful city planning. He writes about how to develop cities that are Lively, Safe, Sustainable, and Healthy. Cities for People is a kind of bible for sustainable cities nerds and is quoted more frequently than Jacobs’ Life and Death of the great American City. Through this four pronged approach, Gehl brings even the largest of city issues down to the basics. The urban landscape, he writes, must be considered through the five human senses and experienced at the speed of walking rather than at the speed of riding in a car or bus or train. This small-scale view, he argues, is too frequently neglected in contemporary projects.

• Listen to Gehl talk about the seating syndrome, cultural changes and human scale for the Louisiana Channel here.

  “We now know that first, we form the cities, but then the cities form us.”

  — Jan Gehl

6. Here is New York by E.B. White (1948)

A book length essay that presages the 9/11 tragedy in ways only a writer can sometimes. He doesn’t address it on the nose, of course, but there’s a pervasive sense of ennui dripping through this gorgeous ode of an essay for the forever city. He hints at a third world war, he addresses the aetheticisation of cities beyond recognition and remarks upon the ways in which it stimulates humanity. A go to piece for anyone interested in cities, in New York, in writing essays.

7. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo ... by Lauren Elkin (2020)

A book about flanerie that itself takes the form of a long, luxurious, at times stressed, stroll through metropolises seen through the eyes of artists that roamed their streets at some point. I’ve recommended this book more number of times than I remember but more than this one, I believe Elkin’s bus poems in the form of “No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus” is even more pertinent as a sustainable transport read.

• I wrote about my own lockdown induced year of online flanerie for Ploughshares.

• Read my review of the bus book here: Paris from the Window Seat: On Lauren Elkin’s “No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus”

Through a tram window seat - by Anandi Mishra - Either/Or

#scurf223: Public transport is the most literary form of travel

8. The Peregrine by J.A. Baker (1967)

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker is phenomenal, magnificent prose on just observing the peregrine falcon. The currents of the sky, these inhabitants of the sky come alive in stark clarity in Baker’s writing. The book is a reminder that the world above our heads and houses,in the sky is so vastly different. It takes us out and away from our screen addled lives that seem stapled to the ground beneath our feet, and screens before our eyes, and flings us skywards. Poetry, daily ruminations, coupled with just perseverance of chasing one bird for many, many years.

9. Is a River Alive by Robert Macfarlane (2025)

Spread across three vast geographies – Ecuador, India and Canada — Robert Macfarlane’s latest and most urgent book Is A River Alive? talks to readers about the undercurrents of how we treat our rivers world over. Not with a lot of dignity, as it turns out. This is a timely intervention taking the form of a book. In it Macfarlane combines poetic fluency with rigorous research, writing about the age-old, nearly mythic question of how human beings disrupted their relationship with these life-giving streams. Pondering over the current state of rivers in most parts of the world, he writes: “We need new thinking: our rivers have become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable. How did it come to this — and where do we go from here?”

• Read my review of the book here.

10. How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy (2017)

An unusual memoir, Roy’s How I Became, that takes us through the discontents of a woman’s life as she finds out that all her misery was related only and only to the human life. In it, Roy explores how countless artists have been inspired to write about, draw, paint and sculpt trees. I like how she described both trees and painters as “clients of light” and juxtaposed against the current moment when everything is more human-oriented than ever, this book stands out.

• Here I write about Roy’s How I Became and much more.

Eyes on the street: A reading list on walking in cities

Suburban walks in a new city, making meaning, connection, and time

The beauty of working in the sustainability ecosystem is that each one of us, from various backgrounds, organisations and outlooks, will have our own singular such reading lists to share. What reads would you recommend to anyone interested in knowing more about your specific domain of sustainability?