Skip to Main Content

Urban Studies & Urban Policy

Welcome!

This research guide is intended to give you a first overview of Harvard's library resources relevant to the interdisciplinary field of urban studies and urban policy.

For a first orientation in the field, try some of the encyclopedias, handbooks, and bibliographies listed below. Then check out recommended databases and journals for more in-depth research as well as data resources and tools.

Overviews & Introductory Readings

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies (Harvard Login)

The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City (Harvard Login)

Handbook of Urban Studies (Print Only)

The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics (Harvard Login)

Critical Urban Studies (Harvard Login)

Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects (Harvard Login)

Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics (Harvard Login)

The Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning (Harvard Login)

The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (Harvard Login)

Handbook of Urban Health (Harvard Login)

Encyclopedia of Urban America (Print Only)

Making Cities Work: Prospects and Policies for Urban America (Harvard Login)

The American Urban Reader (Print Only)

Theories of Urban Politics (Print Only)

The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York (Harvard Login)

The Promise of the City: Space, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary Social Thought (Harvard Login)

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City (Harvard Login)

How Cities Matter (Harvard Login)

The Spirit of Cities (Harvard Login)

Urban Morphology: An Introduction to the Study of the Physical Form of Cities (Harvard Login)

Global Urbanization (Harvard Login)

The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Harvard Login)

In addition to the handbooks, encyclopedias, and introductory/overview texts above, try exploring literature reviews on more specific urban studies topics in these collections:

Annual Reviews (Harvard Login)
State-of-the-art overviews written by experts in the field, offering context, background, and references to seminal texts in one convenient location.
Oxford Bibliographies (Harvard Login)
Concise, continuously updated bibliographies on a wide range of topics covering a broad range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including political science, psychology, and sociology.