As part of our Perspectives on Public Space series, we invited the landscape architects at Los Angeles-based design studio SALT to share some of their favorite book titles related to landscape architecture. Drawing from foundational texts, contemporary research, and works that challenge conventional design thinking, they assembled a reading list that reflects the breadth of the field and the questions that animate it today.

Below, you’ll find titles that offer critical perspectives on the histories and futures of the built environment, providing readers with conceptual tools, case studies, and provocations that expand how we understand and practice landscape architecture. If you want to learn more, be sure to check out our interview with Robin Mark, director of partnerships at SALT, as well as the rest of the episodes in our podcast Perspectives on Public Space. As with all our stories, the red J icon indicates free access to linked research on JSTOR.

Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, & Possible Rebirth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

Mansel G. Blackford notes in his review that Gumprecht’s book, which won the 1999 J. B. Jackson Prize from Association of American Geographers, is a thorough and thoughtful description of how the LA River came to be in its current form, encased in concrete. Gumprecht also details the fight to bring the river back to its former glory—or a version of it. An abbreviated version of the story can be read in Gumprecht’s “51 Miles of Concrete: The Exploitation and Transformation of the Los Angeles River,” published in Southern California Quarterly in 1997.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

(Random House, 1961)

It’s impossible to overstate the effect Jane Jacobs has had on urban design, planning, and policy. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explores what makes neighborhoods come alive, from streets to lively parks and squares. She shows how well-used outdoor spaces where people can gather, watch, and interact are essential to a city’s vitality, and warns against designs that ignore the everyday life happening outside. While some early critics bemoaned Jacobs’s methodologies and conclusions, others saw in her work an invitation to take a more interdisciplinary approach to studying urban spaces. More than six decades after its publication, some of the ideas expressed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities still inform contemporary planning decisions, especially in discussions of surveillance and place-making.

Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movement (Routledge, 2020)

In Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movement, Jane Hutton traces everyday landscape construction materials that are used in urban landscapes back to where they came from—fertilizer, stone, steel, trees and wood. It highlights unequal ecological exchange, labor and material flows that shapes the urban landscapes and underscores the importance of thinking of materials as continuations of stories, even when displaced from their original source.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Verso, 1990)

City of Quartz uncovers the hidden history of Los Angeles, describing how elites, institutions, and cultural narratives shaped the city’s development and power structures. Davis blends ruins, noir, and politics to reveal LA both as a dream factory and as a landscape of control and decline.

Robert Caro, The Power Broker (Knopf, 1974)

The Power Broker is the Pulitzer-winning biography of Robert Moses, the unelected urban planner who amassed extraordinary power and reshaped New York through highways, bridges, and massive public works. The book reveals how Moses’s projects transformed the city but also devastated neighborhoods, exposing the dark side of unchecked technocratic power.

Claire Latané, Schools that Heal (Island Press, 2021)

Schools that Heal demonstrates, through decades of research, that supportive learning environments for students are critical to their overall mental health. Latané provides the reader with stories and data demonstrating that current school design, including fields of asphalt outside of the classroom, harm children both mentally and physically. Latané provides specific advice and recommendations to help students, teachers, parents, and advocates rethink and redesign their schoolyards into verdant green spaces that support environmental justice, resilience, and overall well-being.

Allan B. Jacobs, Great Streets (MIT Press, 1993)

Great Streets compares hundreds of streets around the world to determine the design and other elements that make them great. It contains plans, cross sections, and maps of individual streets and a set of one-square-mile maps of the street plans of 50+ cities around the world.

Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998)

From 1957 to 1972, the artistic and political movement known as the Situationist International (SI) worked aggressively to subvert the conservative ideology of the Western world. The movement’s broadside attack on “establishment” institutions and values left is mark upon the libertarian left, the counterculture, the revolutionary events of 1968, and more recent phenomena from punk to postmodernism. In this book, Simon Sadler investigates the artistic, architectural, and cultural theories that were once the foundations of situationist thought, particularly as they apply to the modern city.

Nato Thompson and Independent Curators International, Experimental Geography (Melville House, 2008)

Experimental Geography is a collection of essays and photographs about actual and speculative projects that explore geography, infrastructure, and our relationship to land. The projects are broad, evocative, and provocative, challenging us to consider our work in landscape architecture in order to think bigger and far differently than we are typically trained to think.

John Tillman Lyle, Design for Human Ecosystems (Island Press, 1999)

Design for Human Ecosystems examines methods of designing landscapes that function in the sustainable ways of natural ecosystems. Through real world examples, the book provides a framework for thinking about ecological design.

Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin Books, 2005)

Richard Louv is widely recognized for initiating the movement aimed at reuniting children with the natural world. As young people become increasingly disconnected from nature, concerns have grown about the impact on their mental, emotional, and even spiritual well-being. Recent studies suggest that spending time in nature can be an effective remedy for issues such as depression, obesity, and attention deficit disorders. Additionally, incorporating nature into education has been shown to boost academic performance, improve test scores, and enhance critical thinking and decision-making abilities.

In his book Last Child in the Woods, Louv speaks with parents, educators, scientists, spiritual leaders, and environmental advocates who acknowledge the growing problem and propose meaningful solutions.

Bob Perry, Landscape Plants for California Gardens (Land Design Publishing, 2010)

Landscape Plants for California Gardens is an extensive, visually rich guide to both native and ornamental plants suited for California’s diverse environments. This well-organized reference covers over 2,100 plant species, offering detailed information on climate zones, water requirements, planting palettes, and curated plant lists. This is a critical book for anyone interested in understanding how plants work together, aesthetically and water-wise, and ways to ensure their health over time.