Reddit reviews Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities

I totally love the Christopher Alexander books. Definitely check out his The Timeless Way of Building which is a great companion piece to A Pattern Language. You should know that his works, while great in my opinion, are sort of considered idiosyncratic and not really in the mainstream of architecture/urban design.

Here's a short reading list you should look at:

The Smart Growth Manual and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany & Jeff Speck. Another set of sort-of-companion works, the Manual has a concrete set of recommendations inspired by the critique of modern town planning in Suburban Nation and might be more useful for your purposes.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous and influential book on city planning ever and contains a lot of really original and thoughtful insights on cities. Despite being over half-a-century old it feels very contemporary and relevant.

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is similarly mostly a critique of modernist planning principles but is both short and very well written so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski: I can't recommend this entire book, but it does contain (in my opinion) the best summary of the history of American urban planning. Really useful for a historical perspective on different schools of thought in city design over the years.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup is the book on parking policy. It's huge (700+ pages) and very thorough and academic, so it might be harder to get through than the other, more popular-audience-oriented titles on the list, but if you want to include parking as a gameplay element, I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a problem that's thorny enough most city games just ignore it entirely: Simcity2013's developers say they abandoned it after realizing it would mean most of their players' cities would be covered in parking lots, ignoring that most actual American cities are indeed covered in parking lots.

Finally there's a bunch of great blogs/websites out there you should check out: Streetsblog is definitely a giant in transportation/design blogging and has a really capable team of journalists and a staggering amount of content. Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns blog and Podcast are a great source for thinking about these issues more in terms of smaller towns and municipalities (in contrast to Streetsblog's focus on major metropolitan areas). The Sightline Daily's blog does amazing planning/transpo coverage of the Pacific Northwest. Finally [The Atlantic Cities] (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/) blog has incredible coverage on city-issues around the world.

I hope this was helpful and not overwhelming. It's a pretty big (and in my opinion, interesting) topic, so there's a lot of ground to cover even in an introductory sense.