Reddit reviews The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
We found 5 Reddit comments about The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
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Mariner Books
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:
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 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.