ancient cities

Id e a l CI t y
Sharp straight lines create linear perspective
dominated by a rotunda in the painting Ideal City
(c. 1470), attributed to Italian Renaissance painter
Piero della Francesca. Symmetrical blocks of
buildings border the frame of the painting.
Patterned pavement in the foreground augments
the perspective. Rare vines are seen on several
facades. No person is seen.
Francesca’s Ideal City was praised for its perfect
linearity and orderliness and shunned for its perfect
sterility and emptiness. The apparent contradiction
between Francesca’s idealized orderly vision
and the common image of the city as a bustling,
lively, messy entity reveals the crucial problem
embedded in the notion of ideal city: What is ideal
according to a set of standards and logical statements
may turn out to be not at all acceptable in
terms of real life.
“Ideal city” is a trope found throughout the history
of human habitation. As a systematic description
of the vision of how the city, its form, and
content should be, it originates in classical Greek
thought. This vision may also be revealed as
underlying city building practice before and after
that. Its varieties include ideal cities in the Western
utopian tradition, visions of ideal city in planning
practice, and anti-utopian and dystopian antipodes
of ideal city. All these visions have important
consequences as they are actualized in human
practice.
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The Phenomenon of Ideal City
An ideal city is a religious or secular vision of the
city in which the portrayed urban environment
reflect a complex of conceptions about what is
deemed good, desires for something better, and
imaginations about what should be. Behind this
vision is the intention to best satisfy the needs of
the population while subjecting it to an idealized
order. This is a normative ideal of the city. It is a
product of the desire to represent and actualize
those features and properties of cities and societies
that are perceived to be absent in real life.
A range of traits may be found, to varying
degrees, in most visions of ideal cities. Ideal city
reflects the values of harmony and order. It encompasses
the eternal desire of humankind to succeed
in creating a balanced social fabric where the
anthropogenic environment serves the needs of the
people and overcomes the age-old ills of urban
living—density, congestion, dirt, crime, poverty,
inequality. Ideal city offers its residents comfort,
justice, happiness, cleanliness, beauty, health, and
well-being. Ideal city is a fundamental entity:
planned and developed by an intentional subject
such as a visionary architect. It implies a totalizing
vision whereby every facet of ideal order is
included and accounted for in the design.
The residents are assumed to voluntarily comply
with the rules and conditions imposed on them
by the designer and by the environment. The
power of nature in the ideal city is implicitly considered
destructive and is effectively eliminated by