Urban Design with Jan Gehl

If you have never heard of Jan Gehl this is a good place to start. For more than forty years Jan Gehl has helped to transform urban environments around the world based on his research into the ways people actually use—or could use—the spaces where they live and work. In this revolutionary book, Cities for People, Gehl presents his latest work creating (or recreating) cityscapes on a human scale. He clearly explains the methods and tools he uses to reconfigure unworkable cityscapes into the landscapes he believes they should be: cities for people.

I especially like his 8 to 80 rule for urban design: it must be appealing to children of 8 and old people of 80.