ancient cities

490 Medieval Town Design
expansion of older existing urban centers, especially
those of Roman antecedence, as well as the
foundation of new towns established sometimes
on greenfield sites, virgin land that had not been
under the plow, and sometimes by being grafted
onto existing preurban settlement nuclei. These
twin processes of urbanization affected the whole
of medieval Europe, but as is typical with this
period, contemporaries wrote down relatively little
about who was involved in shaping these new
urban landscapes and how they went about their
work. Instead, the main indication that these
changes were taking place lies in the physical
forms and layouts of these towns and cities, which
in many cases have survived through to the present
day to be analyzed by geographers and archaeologists.
This question of how urban landscapes
were formed in the Middle Ages has led modern
scholars to look for evidence of town planning
and urban design in the morphology of medieval
urban landscapes. In those rare cases where contemporaries
do refer to planning and design processes,
historians have been able to piece together
from documentary records something of those
individuals and groups that were involved and
how they went about their work. The results of
these modern historical studies, together with the
work of urban morphologists, enables us to see
now a little more clearly how urban landscapes
were designed and planned in the Middle Ages.
Medieval Urban Design
in Modern Urban Discourse
As well as the relative paucity of information to tell
us about how medieval urban landscapes were
formed, a further issue that has complicated the subject
somewhat is the way that medieval towns and
cities are represented in modern urban discourse.
Textbooks on urbanism, for example, still widely
refer to the uncontrolled or unplanned growth of
most towns and cities of the medieval period, drawing
a false distinction between planned and organic
growth-type towns. Both are preconceptions that are
overly simplistic and unhelpful in trying to understand
urbanism in the Middle Ages. In part, these
misunderstandings may be traced back to the start of
the twentieth century and a battle drawn between
planners and architects working in Europe who used
the medieval town to make cases for their own particular
aesthetic or for formulating design ideas for
new urban forms. Le Corbusier in particular had
great distain for the medieval period and its urbanism,
and in his polemical works such as Urbanisme
(published in 1924), he sought to paint a picture of
the medieval city as barbaric and haphazard in its
development and spatial organization. Those at the
time who countered Le Corbusier’s modernism by
arguing for a picturesque approach to architecture
and planning (such as Camillo Sitte and Raymond
Unwin) likewise drew attention to the medieval
forms of towns and cities, but while they were seeking
inspiration in them for their new urban designs,
all the same, like the modernists they too depicted
medieval urban development to be on the whole
unplanned and organic.
In the mid-twentieth century, urban studies
began to reveal a more complicated picture, and
medieval town planning gained acceptance as a
historical reality. Much of this research focused on
new towns of the Middle Ages, especially those
towns that appeared to have been planted on
greenfield sites by entrepreneurial landlords. In
Europe, these studies tended to concern particular
groups of such new towns, notably the bastides of
southwest France, which attracted the attention
especially of scholars in France. These towns have
also fascinated British historians, notably T. F.
Tout in the 1920s and M. W. Beresford in the
1960s. The latter in particular wrote his book,
New Towns of the Middle Ages, as a comparative
study of “town plantation” in England, Wales, and
Gascony. He made claims that founding new
towns was characteristic especially of the period
between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and
that the process was led by enthusiastic lords seeking
to populate and commercialize their lands.
Beresford’s New Towns remains the standard
work on the subject in English, despite its 1967
publication date. Even so, he still characterized
medieval towns and cities according to the bipartite
model differentiating between irregular and
organic-growth towns, on the one hand, and regular,
planned towns on the other. Toward the end of
the twentieth century, more detailed studies of
medieval urban forms, notably by geographers
such as M. R. G. Conzen and T. R. Slater, as well
as historians such as D. Friedman and A. Randolph,
have revealed the complexity of these urban design
and planning processes and finally begun to shatter
the myth that urban landscapes in the Middle Ages
grew spontaneously and were rarely planned.