A small press for books about how cities get built — and what's changing them next.

Every American city is the product of decisions about where the roads went, who was allowed to live where, and what got torn down and rebuilt. Most of those decisions were made by planners working from rules written in response to crises almost everyone has since forgotten.

On the AICP exam those rules arrive as a list of disconnected facts — a date, an acronym, a court case. The Story of Urban Planning argues they were never separate. Zoning answered the crowding of the industrial city. Urban renewal answered the slums zoning couldn't fix. The highway revolts answered urban renewal. The environmental statutes came out of the revolts, and the housing crisis we live in now is in part a consequence of those statutes.

The Standard Zoning Enabling Act, Euclid v. Ambler, the interstate program, NEPA — told as one continuous story from the tenements of the 1890s to today's housing fights, rather than a stack of index cards to memorize.