Doing research for a fiction piece, and was hoping to get some recommendations of books or articles about urban life in German-speaking areas- Nuremberg specifically would be amazing, but any general info would be very helpful as well.
Nuremberg does have a fair degree of studies delving into its Renaissance experience. Many of these books delve into the artistic life of the city. The prosaically entitled Nuremberg: A Renaissance City, 1500-1618 edited by Jeffrey Chipps Smith is emblematic of these type of books. Organized around an exhibition of the city's art, the book explores the culture of patronage and the interaction of its art with its diverse social milieu. Dürer was Nuremberg's most famous son and Joseph Leo Koerner's The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art is one of the more interesting examinations of Dürer (its cover is also really cool ). Less rarified than high art like Dürer's, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel Harrington uses the diary of a Nuremberg executioner to extrapolate a number of details on criminality and other aspects of the mental universe of this era.
Augsburg looms large in a number of social histories of the German Renaissance. Whether this is because its archives survived WWII, Martin Luther, or Lyndal Roper's influence is beyond me (I'm no /u/sunagainstgold !), but it is fairly easy to find texts on this city. Roper's The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg is one of the major texts on this period and exemplifies the intersection of the Reformation onto German renaissance studies. Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany by B. Ann Tlusty is a more fun read than Roper's work and covers drink. Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580-1630 by Alexander J. Fisher moves beyond visual sources and examines the cultural practices in German music in the city during a tense sectarianism. Finally, Tlusty edited a fine anthology Augsburg During the Reformation Era: An Anthology of Sources which gathers together a number of voices from this epoch.
Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century: City Life and Politics between Middle Ages and Modern Times is pretty dated, but it's a good and non-religion-focused overview. Most helpfully, it addresses Nuremberg's odd guildless ("guilds but not really") situation as well as some basic city organizational info.
If by "Renaissance" you mean any years before the Reformation, at all, chapter 1 in Ronald Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys ("Allegiance to the Regnum") is really, really useful on structural social factors, including related to city government and class
Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (i.e. Germany) - Ozment's thesis on why the Reformation happened is in for serious revision, but this is provocative social history--a good counterpart to Roper's book on Augsburg that /u/kieslowskifan mentioned
Ozment also wrote The Burgermeister's Daughter, a microhistory set in another Bavarian city that might be of interest
Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany - what it says on the tin, but she also reconstructs trials and the social networks of the witnesses, so you get a really good picture of the middle/lower classes of society
B. Ann Tlusty has another book, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms that would be of interest
Hopefully combined with the other list, you have a good place to start that can also get you started down narrower search terms!
