ancient cities

Aspects of Urban Design
in the Middle Ages
The formation of new urban landscapes in the
Middle Ages involved a wide variety of different
agents, as well as a long and negotiated decisionmaking
processes. One part of this involved what
we would understand to be design: that is, working
out beforehand what an urban landscape was
to look like. But more broadly, designing was a
phase in a lengthier planning process that required
a series of related stages including finding suitable
sites for urban development, consulting between
local landholders, working out property parcel
sizes and street patterns, and laying out on the
ground the plan elements that were required. Only
after all this had been completed could townspeople
come to take up residence. The whole process
was thus carefully orchestrated and controlled by
the different parties involved—it was certainly no
free-for-all and not at all a spontaneous activity.
The final stage in the process in the case of
founding a new town would come with granting
legal privileges. These privileges were usually set
out in a charter marking the town’s foundation and
were typically awarded by the local lord who had
initiated the process. Even where the newly formed
urban landscape was an addition to an already
existing town or village, a grant of privileges might
be made to likewise encourage newcomers to take
up residence as townspeople. This entire process of
creating new urban landscapes thus proceeded
through a series of discrete stages, each involving
different individuals and groups, which may be
summarized diagrammatically (see Figure 1).
Of this process, the design stage is unfortunately
one of the least visible in documentary records, yet
from morphological evidence, it clearly did take place.
A case in point is the town of Grenade-sur-Garonne,
a bastide in southwest France founded in the 1290s
that has a precise geometrical layout (Figure 2).
This surely must have been designed before construction,
but by whom is not clear.
Some contemporary sources help to illuminate this
design stage of the planning process. For example, a
parchment plan of Talamone, Italy, is likely to have
been drawn for the purposes of deciding the shape
and contents of the new town at the time of its foundation,
to set out its plan, and to allocate properties.
This plan is a unique manuscript, although there are
also cases of architectural drawings—of elevations for
STAGE 1
Location and Timing
Decision:
lord and/or clerks
STAGE 2
Site Selection
Decision:
“appointed men”/supervisors
STAGE 3
Design
Decision:
architect and/or surveyor
STAGE 3
Surveying
Decision:
surveyor and/or engineer
STAGE 3
Chartering
Decision:
lord/town’s inhabitants
Medieval Town Design
491
Planning where the new
town should go:
• Regional planning
• Local planning
Planning what the new
town should look like:
• Design of layout
• Implementation of
layout
Figure 1 Flowchart Showing Stages in the Formation of
a Medieval New Town
cathedrals and other important buildings, for example—that
similarly show designs being worked out
before work began. Again, however, it is rare to find
accounts of who drew up these designs and guided
this stage of the process, although through meticulous
study of the records kept by the Florentine city government
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
David Friedman is able to show how committees were
formed to help in the design of certain new towns
being established in the territory around Florence. The
individuals concerned with this often had experience
of other building projects and design work.
The towns they designed were, in some cases such
as Terranuova, highly geometrical in form, suggesting
that some knowledge of geometry and its application
in design work was important to the
individuals employed on these projects and to their