City building

I've recently really wanted to design medieval or early renaissance towns and cities. I have few good ideas how to start and progress them. But not understanding things like how huge farmlands and such are needed to support them and how many people (families really, because roughly house per family) live in the city make it difficult.

I had a lot of thought put into this a year or two ago, when I was thinking why the town was there in the first place, what it started out as, what would've appeared first to grow it, and iterate that until there's an actual town. That is at its core, what it started out as, and what was established that grew it. Iterating that number of times to grow the town in roughly organic manner.

For advanced generation I should consider more things like what affects the population, like immigration and emigration, disease outbreaks, murder sprees and mass accidents, external threats, and so forth. The town usually would try to prevent the bad kind of from happening again, so how the town grows changes with this. The good kind of changes can also inspire change.

Even more advanced tracking notable individuals in the history of the town who affect the town, pioneers and entrepreneurs and other such hugely impactful people.

In the end I'd like to skip that iterative process and have just a guideline for how to make something that looks well developed but isn't.

I'm going to spend some time looking for resources for this, but for now this is the basic idea for creating towns. This kind of process is more of interest when the history of the town is important, not for throwaway towns that are of barely any interest. Not to mention none of this considers the stage at which urban planning becomes a thing.

Edit (2016-08-20), some resources:
* http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm
* http://www.medieval-spell.com/Medieval-Towns/
* http://www.lostkingdom.net/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning