Hmmm... you may want to put your hands on Bacon's Design of Cities book. He discusses successful urban planning though history but I find that the concepts can be applied at all scales.

Pattern Language?

why not make your own list? You can consolidate and edit the work of people like Lynch, Alexander, Jacobs, and Schulz.

and why does 'place-making' have to immediately echo humanist-essentialist references?

There might be, as well, an undercurrent of contradiction in your quest, module. 'Place-making' implies contingent specificity that has its intellectual birth with Aristotelian topos ...contra the absolute space (your modernist namesake being an example of that) that we can trace from the Platonic chora (admittedly I simplify). Western thought (or rather, that which is termed Western thought) carries both strains of thought and at times the schism between is pronounced.

((my rant here------This might be a reason why criticism against architectures that 'look alike' (and therefor establish a chapter of inter-sympathy..selfreferential..Gehry's or Calatrava's...) immediately cite the buildings' disposition to its locale. Sometimes such criticism can be 'moronic'. Renaissance church domes were not used in connection to 'place' or locale (as understood by the watered-down phenomenology fed to architecture students)...their physicality was a consequence...place-making was indeed a consequence...but above all, it was a cultural excess of meaning (referential, interpretive..a divine one at that). Why do we not attack them domes for being 'uncontextual', or even Renaissance architects as a whole for exceeding specific context? But why are we more inclined to attack Hadid's former sharpened corners? Or Gehry's delerious twists and turns? And site them as being place-irreverent?-------))

A possible contradiction is this: how can place-making be possible through an 'objective rationale'? Is this latter not the very death of 'place' as it makes it subservient to universality?
2 propositions:

1-Place as designed/made: If 'place' is possible, and every place differs...then each dictates its own rationale...that of course being impossible since every addition to the place alters it, makes it into another place...rules and rationales deferring each other endlessly.

2- 'Place' as always the undesigned (whether the space is designed or not). It is the plasma-screen of space, the video tape playing (and at the same moment recording) in the subject's mind. Filtering in and out, framing, editing. Place as the subject(ive) aftereffect. 'Place' as the primary precedent of the 'virtual'.

i read emos raparport. he seems to be heading towards an objective stand