Synopses & Reviews
Churchman or merchant, soldier or sanitary engineer, everyone who lives in a city sees it differently.
Envisioning the City explores how these points of urban view have been expressed in city plans. Ranging from vertical plans to bird's-eye views, profiles, and three-dimensional models, these diverse maps all show cities "the way people want to see them."
Whether a Chinese vertical city plan from the first millennium B.C. or a bird's-eye view appended to a fifteenth-century edition of Ptolemy's Geography, the type of plan chosen and its focus reflected the aspects of a city that the map's creators wished to highlight. For instance, maps of seventeenth-century cities emphasized impregnable fortifications as a deterrent to potential attackers. And Daniel Burnham's famous 1909 Plan of Chicago used a distinct representational style to "sell" his version of the new Chicago.
Although city plans are among the oldest maps known, few books have been devoted to them. Historians of cartography and geography, architects, and urban planners will all enjoy this profusely illustrated volume.
Synopsis
Churchman or merchant, soldier or sanitary engineer, everyone who lives in a city sees it differently. Envisioning the City explores how these points of urban view have been expressed in city plans from various times and places. Ranging from vertical plans to bird's-eye views, profiles, and three-dimensional models, these diverse maps all show cities "the way people want to see them".
The type of plan chosen and its focus reflect the aspects of a city that the map's creators wished to highlight. For instance, the earliest city plans known -- Chinese vertical plans from the first millennium B.C. -- reflected the Chinese ideal of the city, regardless of whether the actual cities depicted were so precisely planned, whereas bird's-eye view plans appended to a fifteenth-century edition of Ptolemy's Geography offered a different attitude toward urban space, one shaped by an aesthetic appreciation of classical and ecclesiastical buildings. City maps in early modern Spain served the ideological needs of churchmen and royal officials, but the military objective of deterring potential attackers led to the creation of different plans from the same time period, which depicted cities as impregnable fortifications. Military concerns were also reflected to some extent in the city models constructed for Louis XIV of France; the shrewd strategist Napoleon praised these highly detailed models as "the best maps that we have". And Daniel Burnham's famous 1909 Plan of Chicago used a distinct representational style to "sell" his version of the new Chicago.
Although city plans are among the oldest maps known, few books have been devoted to them. Historians of cartography and geography, architects, andurban planners will all enjoy this profusely illustrated volume.
Table of Contents
Editor's Note
Introduction by David Buisseret
1: Mapping the Chinese City: The Image and the Reality
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt
2: Mapping the City: Ptolemy's Geography in the Renaissance
Naomi Miller
3: Urbs and Civitas in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain
Richard L. Kagan
4: Military Architecture and Cartography in the Design of the Early Modern City
Martha Pollak
5: Modeling Cities in Early Modern Europe
David Buisseret
6: The Plan of Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett: Cartographic and Historical Perspectives
Gerald A. Danzer
Contributors
Index