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.
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