City Map

Cities began to be mapped almost as soon as they appeared. We have stone city maps from ancient Babylon and many such maps on paper from an early period in China and Japan. The classical Greeks were chiefly known for their maps of the whole world. But the Romans produced remarkable stone plans of such cities as Orange and Rome itself, often setting them up in public places.

All of these ancient plans were more or less pla-nimetric, showing the city as if from directly overhead. In early modern Europe, inspired to some degree by the city plans found in some versions of the Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, town plans began to multiply, offering three main types. Particularly in Italy, plans of the classical type became common in the sixteenth century. They were joined, then, by two new types: the “profile” and the bird's-eye view. The profile, analogous to the marine “landfall,” showed the city as it would appear to a person approaching it on the ground, while the bird's-eye view showed it from a high oblique angle (and involved some ingenious imaginary constructions).

Many such plans were produced in the first great age of copper-engraving, in the sixteenth century, and at the end of that century many city plans were collected together into the Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cities of the World), published by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg in Cologne between 1595 and 1617. Like the contemporary atlas of Abraham Ortelius, the work of Braun and Hogenberg relied on a large number of contributors to provide images drawn, eventually, from much of the world.

These images might adopt any of the three types described earlier. As time went by, the profile became less common, as did the bird's-eye view. Clearly, from the point of view of city planning, a planimetric view offered the greatest possibility for precision. However, profiles and bird's-eye views have never fallen completely out of use. Modern skyscraper cities are often shown as profiles, and bird's-eye views, often with the main buildings shown in an exaggerated way, have proved one of the best ways of introducing a city to tourists.

In the age of computer mapping, city images are of course generally planimetric. The possibility of overlaying a great many variables—streets, electrical conduits, schools, sewers, crime sites, and so on—offers the modern city planner possibilities of analysis that are full of potential.