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 how long ago someone 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 other, 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.

Increased 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 would 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.