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Okay, I think I am done w/ my review of readings about the city. There's lots, and I've created a page w/ my many reading notes. To summarize--In The City Reader, LeGates and Stout have assembled a cluster of classical texts (Lewis Mumford's “What Is a City?” Louis Wirth's "Urbanism as a Way of Life," Shaon Zukin's "Whose Culture? Whose City"), which I think we could draw on. I also "discovered" a French philosopher named Henri LeFebvre  whose thinking seems particularly akin to ours. Some selections from his 1996 translated collection of Writings on Cities:

* play is…supreme value….to city people the urban centre is movement, the unpredictable, the possible and encounters. For them, it is either “spontaneous theatre” or nothing.... The right to the city manifests itself as…right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit. The right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation (clearly distinct form the right to property), are implied in the right to the city

* the city can be read because it writes…However, it is not enough to examine  this without recourse to context…what is below the text to decipher (daily life, immediate relations, the unconscious of the urban…) hides itself in the inhabited spaces—sexual and family life—and rarely confronts itself, and what is above this urban text (institutions, ideologies), cannot be neglected in the deciphering…..the city cannot therefore be conceived as a signifying system, determined and closed as a system. The taking into consideration the levels of reality forbids…this systematization.

* We...here propose a first definition of the city as a projection of society on the ground….not only a far order, a social whole, a mode of production, a general code, it is also…times, rhythms. The city is heard as much as music as it is read as a discursive writing. …another definition ….the city as the ensemble of differences …. another definition, of plurality, coexistence and simultaneity in the urban of patterns….These definitions…do not exclude other definitions. If a theoretician sees in the city the place of confrontations and of (conflictual) relations between desire and need….Today, by becoming a centre of decision-making…the modern city intensifies by organizing the exploitation of the whole society….

* On Urban Form
Mentally: simultaneity (of events, perceptions, and elements of a whole in the ‘real’).
Socially: the encounter and the concentration of what exists around, in the environments (assets and products, acts and activities, wealth) and consequently, urban society as privileged social site, as meaning of productive and consuming activities, as meeting between the oeuvre and the product….in so-called modern society, simultaneity is intensified and becomes more dense..the capacities for encounter and assembly become strengthened. Communications speed up to quasi-instantaneity….circuits of information flow and are diffused from this centrality….under the same conditions dispersion increases: the division of labour is pushed to the extreme segregation of social groups ….Movement…reveals…the dialectical (conflictual) movement of content and urban form: the problematic…Before whom and for whom is simultaneity established, the contents of urban life assembled?

* The situation of…the city is eminently paradoxical. Theoretically there are two opposing points of view. The first is an anti-city tradition, which has a lengthy past. The city is the site of corruption, of Hell, Babylon…an infamous place….a place of constraints…beset by tensions…the place...of breakup of society….There is another tradition of Greek origin which is that of the City. It is the place where civilization, culture and art develop. It is in the City that art appear and is produced….the modern city is not thought out because we haven’t resolved the contradiction between these two traditions

* Liberty is..the maximum of possibilities of each citizen in the city…We must find the link between the mode of production and what is called free time…free time can be fully productive in the widest sense, of art, of knowledge, of the lived. It is a delicate question which supposes the mastery by each person of their time, with a multiplicity of possibilities. This disjunction which we make between ‘productive time’ and ‘free time’ is very symptomatic