Urban Planning

Aristotle called the Greek philosopher Hippodamas the father of city planning because Hippodamas supposedly designed the right-angled grid layout for towns. Street layouts into rectangular blocks existed long before Hippodamas (498 - 408 BCE), however, so we don't really know the first person who decided that streets should be planned out carefully in patterns.

The Romans used orthogonal layouts in their colonies. A central forum was surrounded by civil service buildings, with two wider-than-average roads—one running north-south, one running east-west—intersecting at the forum. Streets were laid out in uniform widths at right angles to achieve a grid, creating rectangular "blocks" for houses. Pope Pius II re-designed the town of his birth in a similar fashion, renaming it Pienza after himself.

After the 5th-century Fall of Rome in Western Europe, many of their colonies did not maintain the same civil services; urban living started to revert to agrarian styles, and urban planning was less of a focus. Urban culture started to revive in the 10th and 11th centuries with stronger central governments forming and more international trade.

Increasing population created a need for more food, which meant more areas were opened up to agriculture. As these areas spread farther from existing towns, new centers of living had to spring up to avoid unnecessarily long commutes.

Many residential areas sprang up organically around a fortress or an abbey. Because a fortress could have been set up on a hill for defensive purposes, the buildings and streets created around it might have been designed more to accommodate the topographical setting than an orthogonal layout.

Still, many towns were created deliberately by a lord who controlled a fortress. A town could produce economic advantages that a lord could tax. The rise of more towns in Europe hit a peak in the early 14th century. By the mid-14th, however, a worldwide health crisis caused an enormous number of towns to be abandoned for lack of residents. I'm talking about the Black Death, of course, which has been mentioned numerous times in this blog. Tomorrow, let's talk about what happened immediately after the Black Death, and the economic impact it had.

The Piccolominis and Pienza

Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini (18 October 1405 - 14 August 1464) had a very simple origin. He was born to the very large family of a simple soldier. The Black Death reduced his siblings from 18 to two sisters, leaving only Enea to work the fields with his father.

Eventually he became a priest and secretary to a bishop, then secretary to the antipope Felix V, then pope himself as Pius II, recounted in this post. What that leaves out was that he used his authority as pope to indulge in some urban planning, designing a "perfect city."

His perfect city started as the town of Corsignano in Siena, his birthplace. It appears in records as early as the 9th century. The Piccolomini family came into possession of parts of it about a century before Enea was born. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II had given an ancestor, Engelbherto Piccolomini, a fiefdom there in 1220. This is the town he chose to become "Pienza" ("Pius city").

He rebuilt the town over five years into what he considered an ideal Renaissance city, with a cathedral (the building on the left in the illustration), palaces for the family and for the bishop, and a new town hall in a trapezoidal pattern. He intended it as a vacation place from Rome.

The rebuilding was overseen by Bernardo Rossellini (1409–1464), whose design work was enhanced by his skill at assembling a large number of skilled stoneworkers to create a premier workshop in Florence.

Pope Pius was the only pope until that time who had written an autobiography. In 1462 he began an account of his life, including details about the structures of Pienza. This was perhaps unnecessary, because they still stand. (In 1996 Pienza was declared a UNESCO Heritage site.)

This was an early example of urban planning. Are there others? What was the status of urban planning in the Middle Ages? Let's start to answer that question tomorrow.