There were plenty of discussions about human-scale cities here on HN (and I hope to see more of them) :)

One oft-quoted title is Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", which advocates several building and design patterns, and ended up picked up mostly by the software engineering community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

some previous discussions here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111406

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591834

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=331006