Urban Planning through History: Grids, Boulevards and Garden Cities

Urban planning is the art of shaping a city’s streets, squares, blocks and green spaces. Since antiquity cities have been planned with grids, walls, boulevards or gardens, and the plan reveals the ideas and the power behind it: trade, defence, order or an ideal of how people should live.

Facts

The grid and the Romans

The oldest cities grew up without a plan, with winding streets around a square or a sanctuary. But already in the fifth century BC the Greek architect Hippodamus of Miletus planned cities with a rectangular grid in which streets divided the city into equal blocks. The grid was rational, easy to survey and made it possible to hand out plots fairly.

The Romans took up the idea. Their camps and colonial towns, castra, had two main streets crossing in the middle, cardo and decumanus, with the forum at the crossing. Large public buildings such as the Colosseum and aqueducts, squares and baths made the city a system; read more in the guide to Roman architecture. The period is described under antiquity.

Medieval towns and the Renaissance ideal city

Medieval towns grew organically, often within walls, with narrow streets following the terrain and a square with a church and a town hall in the middle. This can give lively and intimate settings. Many Nordic towns, such as Visby and Stockholm’s Old Town, still bear traces of their medieval plan. See the Middle Ages.

In the Renaissance people dreamed of ideal cities that reflected mathematical order. Palmanova in Italy, founded in 1593, is a star-shaped fortress with nine points and streets radiating from a hexagonal square. Perspective, which led the eye to a distant point, became a planning tool; read about it in the guide to linear perspective.

Baroque axes and nineteenth-century boulevards

The Baroque planned on a grand scale with axes, circuses and squares meant to impress. Around 1585–1590 Pope Sixtus V had straight streets driven between Rome’s churches to ease pilgrims’ journeys. Versailles by Louis Le Vau and the garden designer André Le Nôtre showed power in the form of endless avenues radiating from the king’s bedroom.

In the nineteenth century cities grew strongly with industry. Baron Haussmann rebuilt Paris in 1853–1870 with broad boulevards, parks and uniform façades, partly to improve hygiene and traffic, partly to be able to control riots. Ildefons Cerdà drew Barcelona’s grid, the Eixample, in 1859, with chamfered corners, and in Vienna the Ringstrasse was built on the old ramparts from 1857.

The garden city, functionalism and Vällingby

As a reaction against cramped, dirty industrial cities Ebenezer Howard proposed in 1898 the garden city: small towns with housing, workplaces and greenery. Letchworth in England, founded in 1903, became the first. Le Corbusier went the other way and proposed tower blocks in parks, with a strict division of housing, work, recreation and traffic; see the Unité and the guide to functionalism. The Swedes showed the idea early at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930.

Vällingby in Stockholm, planned by Sven Markelius and inaugurated in 1954, became a model: an ABC town with work, housing and a centre, linked by metro. The Million Programme of 1965–1974 built a million homes in Sweden but was criticised for its large scale. Brasília, designed by Lúcio Costa with Oscar Niemeyer and inaugurated in 1960, shows the modern city of ideas in the shape of an aeroplane. The period is found under modernism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who proposed the garden city in 1898?