ancient cities

often cited as the country’s most beautiful. Its
downtown area in particular has successfully balanced
the needs of architecture and open space,
pedestrians and automobiles, in a harmonious
manner that is seen as a model for redefining
urban design principles in the twenty-first century.
Beyond its downtown and ring of historic streetcar
suburbs, however, Savannah has witnessed the
same unremarkable urban sprawl that characterizes
most other American cities.
The city was founded in 1733 by General James
Oglethorpe, the leader of a philanthropic corporation
of English gentlemen granted trusteeship of
the colony of Georgia. They sought to establish a
charitable colony for England’s urban poor and continental
refugees of religious persecution. Oglethorpe’s
urban plan for Savannah provided a map for this
egalitarian idealism, rooted in Christian charity and
the growing spirit of rationalism of his day.
Oglethorpe sited his colonial capital 17 miles
inland from the Atlantic Ocean on the south bank
of the Savannah River, where the ground rose
about 40 feet above the water—truly high ground
in a coastal region dominated by tidal marshes and
low-lying barrier islands.
The Original Oglethorpe Plan
Oglethorpe devised a plan linking the region to the
city in which each freeholder received a roughly
45-acre farm lot, a 5-acre garden lot, and a 60-by-
90-foot town lot. His city plan comprised a cellular
network of six wards, configured in two rows
of three. Each ward centered on a public square
flanked the east and west by pairs of “trust lots”
reserved for public buildings as determined by the
trustees. To the north and south of the square and
trust lots lay four residential “tything” blocks,
each comprising ten lots set in two rows of five
divided by a lane. The 1733 plan also incorporated
a graduated hierarchy of impressively wide civic
streets and narrower utilitarian streets, each in full
and half-width versions. Civic streets make contact
with the central square in each ward—the 75-footwide
streets aligning with the center of the square
and the central east–west street (now Broughton
Street) dividing the two rows of wards, along with
the 37½-foot-wide streets skirting the edges of the
squares, while the utilitarian streets make no contact
with the squares and (at first) had no buildings
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fronting them—that is, the 45-foot-wide north–
south streets dividing the wards and the 22½-footwide
lanes dividing the tything lots. These distinctions
between civic and utilitarian streets persist to the
present day.
Historians have cited an impressive range of
potential sources of inspiration for the Oglethorpe
plan. The appearance of multiple squares in
Savannah strongly resembles the network of
squares developed in London’s west end, beginning
in the late seventeenth century. The specific
configuration of streets and public space, however,
may derive from the Renaissance town plans or the
Forbidden City in Beijing. Freemasonry may have
influenced the specific size of the streets.
Expansion of the Plan
The evolution and incremental growth of the city
plan distinguished Savannah from other planned
cities of the period. In founding Savannah,
Oglethorpe laid out a relatively modest town of six
wards. He initially plotted out only what was necessary,
but he allowed for growth as needed by
surrounding the town with a common. The expansion
of Savannah’s plan into the common through
a series of at least six separate phases illustrated
the remarkable flexibility of Oglethorpe’s ward
system. Unlike a typical grid with fixed dimensions,
the specific dimensions and even the relative
proportions of a Savannah ward could be elongated
or compressed without removing any components
or detracting from its inherently human
scale. For example, the wards added in the 1790s
to the east and west of the original six wards were
modified to fit the available common land by
diminishing the size of the square and reducing the
number of tything lots.
The planning logic inherent in the Savannah plan
guided architectural development in the city’s downtown
area since Oglethorpe’s time. Public buildings
were allocated prominent sites on trust lots in each
ward, effectively distributing institutions of government,
commerce, and religion throughout the town
and thereby stemming the emergence of a dominant
center of power. Over time, the end tything lots facing
the square became desirable for prominent mansions
and commercial buildings.
The configuration of residential building lots in
Savannah resulted in a distinctive housing form. In