This book reframes city-making as a collaborative cultural process—shaped by stories, rituals, and relationships, not just bricks and regulations. It offers a vocabulary and set of practices for embedding empathy, pluralism, and public imagination into civic infrastructure, directly aligning with The Change Lab’s mission of building social cohesion and systemic change from the ground up.

Matthew Desmond doesn’t just write about poverty — he exposes it. In Poverty, by America, he makes the case that poverty persists not because we lack resources or ideas, but because the system is designed to protect the comfort of some at the expense of others. This is not a book about the poor. It’s a book about us — and the choices we make, knowingly or not, that allow poverty to survive in one of the wealthiest nations in history.

The Change Lab exists to cultivate civic imagination and collective action. Gamestorming 2.0 offers the facilitation tools to help us get there—by helping people connect across difference, think in systems, and create shared pathways forward. Whether designing workshops, guiding coalitions, or prototyping new futures, this book is a core tool in our civic toolkit.

Seth Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods makes a powerful case that some of our biggest national challenges — disconnection, distrust, division — are playing out most clearly in our neighborhoods. And more importantly, that these same neighborhoods hold the answers we’ve been searching for.

He doesn’t offer quick fixes. Instead, he invites us to zoom in — to the street, the school, the church, the local nonprofit — and ask: How strong are the relationships here? Who feels seen? Who’s left out? It’s a deeply human approach that resonates with everything we’re trying to do at The Change Lab.

Emergent Strategy asks us to pay attention to the small — the conversations, the choices, the patterns we live by every day — because that’s where real change begins. It’s rooted in nature, relationship, and imagination. And it challenges the idea that we need a perfect plan before we act. Instead, it reminds us that change is constant, and that what we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole.

Ben McBride’s Troubling the Water is both a personal testimony and a public call to action—a deeply spiritual, emotionally honest, and politically relevant work that challenges the reader to live differently.