What are the best original research papers in Urban and Regional Planning, by topic?

Of course the most original and maybe still the best was not a  formal research paper at all: "Life and Death of Great American Cities." For actual research papers, I'm not really the best person to ATA about this because I'm not an academic and don't really follow the academic discourse. I certainly can't list papers in all the topics listed in the question. But I'll mention one I think was important: Newman and Kenworthy's 1989 JAPA paper: "Gasoline consumption and Cities: A comparison of U.S. Cities with a Global Survey." The premise seems laughably simple: graph density to automobile fuel use to show the relationship between sprawl and energy. It set off a firestorm (in a very limited, urban planning sort of way) of criticism and further research about the relationship between sprawl and environmental indicators, which I think really was the story for planners in the past few decades. It turns out that - like seemingly all interesting questions in planning - it's very hard to get an unambiguous picture of what is going on. People immediately pointed out that the independent and dependent variables were confounded (population/km2 and gasoline use/population) and many subsequent studies have not really solved the problem, although I think most people accept the basic relationship. P.S. I can't let this question go by without mentioning my favorite paper title of all time, a critical examination from 1992 of cities' preference for light rail transit over bus transit: Don Pickrell's "A Desire Named Streetcar."