Reddit mentions of The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

Check out The City in History by Lewis Mumford.

I highly suggest purchasing resource books on urban design, urban planning, and city structure. I will list some for you. I like to keep the aid of resource books in my personal library collection, and I am finding that urban planning resource books are helping me greatly in my world-building process.

I highly suggest looking into the life work of urban planner and MIT lecturer Kevin A. Lynch. He studied how urban environments are heavily shaped and influenced by fundamental human values and perceptions. Cities reflected directly those whom lived within them according to Lynch.

Here is a list of books as well as a link to their Amazon page:

• Good City Form by Kevin A. Lynch link here
  
  
• The Image of the City by Kevin A. Lynch link here
  
  
• The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford link here
  
  
• Design of Cities: Revised Edition by Edmund N. Bacon link here
  
  
• The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History by Spiro Kostof link here
  
  Provided on each page is a wide variety of other resource books depending on the time period you are aiming on world-building around. I hope this helped.

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander.

Read all the Derrida or any other theorist du jour, but temper it with this. At the end of the day, you're building for humans, and A Pattern Language covers the elements of Architecture that enrich life.


http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261628781&sr=8-1


Also a fantastic read, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford.
More along Urban Design lines, but knowing how we got here and where we're headed is important.

http://www.amazon.com/City-History-Origins-Transformations-Prospects/dp/0156180359

Try these books:

• The City In Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, by James Howard Kunstler
  
  
• The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, by Lewis Mumford

The City in History, by Lewis Mumford
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0156180359/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_XyJ5wbJ5GVJMG

According to this guy, one important turning point in a settlement during the Middle Ages was when it was given the right to build its own walls. You had to have permission from the monarch to do that.

Lots of generally useful information about cities in this book.