I was studying in the UK, and the urban design assignments set me thinking. I already had 23 years of experience in architecture and urban design, and I wanted to bring the thinking of developed countries into that experience. I have worked on five large-scale projects, including Legends of Arabia, an ADNOC housing development and the Business Bay towers. In practice, I sometimes found that conversations with consultants became cautious when they reached professional experience. I believed the study in the UK would add another layer to what I knew.
Most of the books on this website come from that period. I bought them as a student, skimmed many of them, and promised myself I would read them properly one day and share whatever was useful. This article is the map of that promise. Think of it as a walk. At each step an idea sparked and I picked up a book. Each step tells you why I picked it up, what I found, and gives a verdict: whether the book held up in practice, held up in parts, or was not what I expected.
The thesis lens: three books on the urban design process
I decided to study the professional experience of the UK through the lens of my thesis, the urban design process. That took me all the way to London to buy books, each chosen after careful assessment.
The first book I read was The Urban Design Process by Shirvani. It covers the whole process from the US perspective, from government to the final stage, and even takes in the engineering parts. Verdict: held up.
The second was The Nature of Urban Design. It is also a US perspective, focused on the environment, public space and the activities around them, but it does not cover the engineering and planning parts of the process. Verdict: held up in parts.
The third was Sustainable Urban Design: An Environmental Approach. Its content is from the UK and it takes a sustainability approach, with examples from practice and an explanation of the process. Verdict: held up.
Berlin, Barcelona and London
Before the thesis started I decided to study Berlin and Barcelona, in addition to London, so three cities in all. My teacher asked me why these cities. I told him I wanted to study important European cities that had passed through the industrial era and then witnessed massive development. So I gathered books that linked to practice.
Barcelona: The Urban Evolution of a Compact City gave me direct contact with the transformation and regeneration of many parts of the city. It did not cover the urban design process as such, but some of its projects showed the full cycle. The Architecture of Barcelona supplemented it with the details of architecture projects within the development, linked to the urban design process. Verdict: both held up.
Berlin Urban Design: A Brief History of a European City was the one that directed me to other useful areas. It gave the full picture of developing a city through its main regeneration and design projects, with detailed information on each project it discussed. Verdict: held up.
Hints from my teachers
One day my thesis teacher emailed me to come to his office. He asked about the progress of the thesis and then about the essay I was writing on the transformation of London. In the discussion I talked about the development of the road network and the difficulties the public sector faced in building it. He pointed me to Terry Farrell’s Shaping London: The Patterns and Forms That Make the Metropolis, but I did not buy it. Instead I searched online for the development of transport planning from the architecture perspective and found The Art of Shaping the Metropolis. It discusses transport planning on the large scale of Madrid and the work of the public sector from planning to completion. Verdict: held up. It was very useful to me.
I also raised the lack of resources for my research. He apologised that the university could buy only three books for a master’s student and that I would have to find the rest myself, and he hinted at a second-hand shop in the city with useful books on the regeneration of London. By then the subject of my essay had become shaping the metropolis. There I found The Urban Process: Cities in Industrial Societies. It describes London as an industrial city that went through massive change, but only in general terms. I found no design information in it. Verdict: held up in parts.
The bridge between urban design and urban planning is very strong. In class, one teacher kept hinting at two books. I asked about the first, Selling the City, and she told me I needed to understand the atmosphere of public sector and council work, so I bought both. Selling the City covers how public bodies build the image of a city, how cities are ranked worldwide and what affects the ranking, and the role of council work. It was useful for a while but not directly connected to urban design and planning; it is marketing applied to planning. When I came back to it after starting this website, I found it more useful for planners working in the public sector. Verdict: held up in parts.
The second was Smart Choices. I was curious about it, but when I read it, it did not match the impression I had built. It covers general techniques that ordinary people use to choose between alternatives, and the social behaviour behind those choices. It has some use, but I do not think it is the best fit for urban planners, because there are better books on how planners decide. I read it because the teacher chose it. Verdict: not what I expected.
Another teacher often referred to Faludi in lectures, and not always favourably. I was curious, so I bought Faludi’s A Reader in Planning Theory and read it at a later stage. It covers the theory base of planning and its role in planning practice. It is old, but it is a very good book. Verdict: held up.
Learning how theory is built
At the end of the year I received feedback on my thesis about the argument and the use of theory in the text. The feedback was that, as I had written it, my argument left too much open: almost anything in it could be right or wrong, and that kind of argument does not suit urban planning. So I decided to learn how theory is built, how it makes an argument strong, and how it supports a student in debate, with a teacher and in practice.
The first book I bought was Robert Dubin’s Theory Building: A Practical Guide to the Construction and Testing of Theoretical Models. While I waited at the end of the year to receive my degree and return home, I went to the public library every day and read it. It explains the components of theory building in detail, with examples from academia. Verdict: held up.
Dubin points in his first papers to the structure of scientific theory, so I ordered The Structure of Scientific Theories to complete the cycle of reading. I received an SMS that the book was waiting at the post office, but I could not wait because I had to leave the country. So I walked from the morning until I reached the post office in Everton and collected it. Later I spent nearly a month at the Al Khor library in Dubai reading it. It explains in great detail how scientists build a theory and how they debate the critical matters while doing so, and it covers the process of building theory in scientific research. Verdict: held up. It is very useful for an urban planning professional.
Economics, and the idea of writing a book
One evening at dinner a friend asked me about unemployment and its effect on a country’s economic performance. He said people without work need the support of a social network, and in the Middle East that support is lacking. Then he asked how the government of India manages the issue. I had no details, only the general idea that people move abroad to work. So I searched for the best book on economic development and went to the Mankhool library, which had a copy. I read a couple of chapters there and bought the electronic copy. The Process of Economic Development is extremely useful for its statistical studies and is treated as a textbook in the West. It covers many themes of economic development, centred on Asia and partly on the West. Verdict: held up.
At the public library in London, after my master’s degree, the idea of writing a book grew again. I remembered my intention, from my undergraduate years, to publish a book. I had turned my undergraduate thesis into a book, and I have still not decided whether to publish it. The idea kept circling in my mind, so I researched how to publish and market books. The best book I found was Running Down a Dream: Your Road Map to Winning Creative Battles by Tim Grahl, about an author struggling to publish his book who invented several ways to help himself, using social media and a podcast. That stayed in my mind. Verdict: held up.
The pandemic: reading for the website
The pandemic hit, everything stopped, and I left my job to return to my country. I started reading about writing, publishing and marketing, and decided to build a website to promote my book using techniques published by others. I read many books on marketing, publishing, online writing and its relation to search engine visibility. I published two books. One of them sets out my method of writing, an assessment framework, and an indicator for measuring and judging quality, as well as how to write a book.
As the idea developed, I began to think about how to serve readers, and I decided to write about professional practice and anything related to it. With students in mind, I chose Bridging Urbanities: Reflections on Urban Design in Shanghai and Berlin. It was the first book in my field that I read in the pandemic. It gives excellent information about a postgraduate programme and its technical side, as well as about the urbanities of Berlin and Shanghai, and it shows how to choose a postgraduate programme and how it fits into practice. Verdict: held up.
Also with students in mind, I went back to a book I had only skimmed in the UK, Building Brasil: The Proactive Urban Renewal of Informal Settlements, and read it to the end. It describes a master’s programme at ETH in Switzerland. I was surprised. In my reading, the programme leans towards a survey of architecture and has little connection to urban design. Verdict: not what I expected.
Systemic Design Can Change the World has a very attractive title. When I read it, I found a study of environmental pollution, in water and soil, in one area of the US. It is useful for environmental studies but offers limited new knowledge for urban design. Verdict: not what I expected.
Promoting my book needed skills I did not have, so I looked for a book to improve them and found Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It has very useful ideas from practice on marketing, business management and the psychology of people. Verdict: held up.
To strengthen my published book on writing and analysis, I went back to books I had bought in the UK: Theory Building in Applied Disciplines and Theory Building in Educational Research. I read them with great care. They go through theory building in two fields with varied examples, point out defects in related areas and explain their causes. They are useful for PhD students and for anyone dealing with the theory side of thesis writing. Verdict: both held up.
Back to the UK shelf
When I wrote the first article on this website, I planned to write about the subjects I had studied at postgraduate level: urban planning, city development and urban fabric, and urbanism. So I went back to the books from my UK years.
Urbanism for Sale: Feld72, an Austrian Practice Perspective is a field study in the EU on how people feel about public space and how to turn wasted spaces into useful ones. For my purposes it added little. Verdict: not what I expected.
Urban Renaissance: A Better Life in Towns was one of the second-hand books I had skimmed while studying abroad. It explains the problems of UK urban life, from living conditions to planning, neighbourhoods and the role of the public sector, and gives some examples of UK projects. It is useful for historians and for planners who want to understand the UK environment in the industrial era, but it has nothing on urban design. Verdict: held up in parts.
During the pandemic I also sat in the living room and asked about the university books I had bought when I was young. My family said they had kept them all in the home library. I found a book by one of my former teachers, Principles in Art and Architecture (مبادئ في الفن والعمارة). I remembered reading it long ago, and as I understand it, it is an Arabic edition of an English book by a US author, so I went looking for the original and found The Art of Color and Design. It is very useful and serves people who wish to study architecture. Verdict: held up.
Investing in property: two books
While I was working, a colleague in the next room of my flat started a discussion with me about investing and what he was thinking about property. I had planned to read a book on how developers think and decide to develop, but that conversation turned me to The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller, with Dave Jenks and Jay Papasan, a practitioner’s guide for people who want to invest in property. The author guides readers through building wealth one purchase at a time: buying houses one after another and financing each in turn. He is just as clear about the difficulties along the way, especially the financing of each purchase. I am reporting the author’s method, not recommending it. It was a very useful book for me. Verdict: held up.
Years later, in the early days of the pandemic, I was working on a building design when my manager said the owner might stop the work. I asked his permission to speak to the owner. I told him that if something was making him uncomfortable he should say so. If he was worried about finance, we could bring in people to help, and I handed over the names of three companies that provide finance. If he was worried about filling the building, the answer was easy: employ one person to handle the marketing for sale and rent every day.
That was the spark for Real Estate Investment and Financial Strategy. I called the manager of my previous company, who knew about finance but could give me only limited information. So I read the book. It goes through the whole process and procedure of how developers finance and invest in the US context, with advice from practice on reducing failure. It was a very useful book, and its investment strategies match the way work is done in the Middle East. Verdict: held up.
The wrong turn: what the books told me, and what Google says
Not every book on my shelf held up. When I began writing for this website, I turned to books on blogging, writing and search visibility, and they gave me numbers. One piece of advice was to write 500 words continuously to bring traffic. I followed it, and the first article of one of my series, at about 500 words, never performed. [City in layers part 1 .] Other advice said to write more than 2000 words, and later I read that 3000 to 5000 words does much better. Following advice that swung between 500 and 5000 words cost me six years of work.
Those books were not wrong about everything. Long articles often do rank well, because a topic covered properly usually takes many words. The books took that pattern and turned it into a rule. Google itself says otherwise. In its own guidance on helpful content, it lists writing to a particular word count, because you have heard Google prefers one, as a warning sign, and states that it has no such preference. Google’s John Mueller has made the same point in public, saying that word count is not a sign that a page is thin and that writers should not use it to judge their content. The checklist Google offers instead asks different questions. Does the article give original information or analysis? Does it describe the topic completely? Does it go beyond the obvious? Does it add real value to the sources it draws on? Is the title a helpful summary of what is inside?
Being useful is not the only requirement. Google also needs to be able to find the page, crawl it and index it before it can be considered for results, and the page has to match something people are actually searching for. Depth decides whether an article deserves to be found. The other factors decide whether it is.
What I learned came from watching my own website, day after day, and not from reading. The articles that did well, such as my Paradigm Shift in Architecture series, cover the topic properly, cite their sources and say something specific. They happen to run to 2500 to 3000 words, but the length followed from the content and not the other way round. I can only report what I observed, and it changed how I write. [Paradigm shift in architecture: byzantine, Romanesque, gothic] the last three months it generated 4840 impressions and its average position on google search engine is 9.7.
What this means for you
For you, the visitor, this is what the reviews offer: the second reading, the slow one, done by someone who has since spent years in practice. I tell you why I picked up each book, what it gave me, and where it fell short. Use the map to start where your own question starts. And if you are writing for a website of your own, the advice I wish I had been given is short: cover your subject until nothing important is left, say something specific, show your sources, and let the length be whatever that takes.