Medieval Town Design

Medieval Urban Design in Modern Urban Discourse

As well as the relative paucity of information to tell us about how medieval urban landscapes were formed, a further issue that has complicated the subject somewhat is the way that medieval towns and cities are represented in modern urban discourse. Textbooks on urbanism, for example, still widely refer to the uncontrolled or unplanned growth of most towns and cities of the medieval period, drawing a false distinction between planned and organic growth-type towns. Both are preconceptions that are overly simplistic and unhelpful in trying to understand urbanism in the Middle Ages. In part, these misunderstandings may be traced back to the start of the twentieth century and a battle drawn between planners and architects working in Europe who used the medieval town to make cases for their own particular aesthetic or for formulating design ideas for new urban forms. Le Corbusier in particular had great distain for the medieval period and its urban-ism, and in his polemical works such as Urbanisme (published in 1924), he sought to paint a picture of the medieval city as barbaric and haphazard in its development and spatial organization. Those at the time who countered Le Corbusier's modernism by arguing for a picturesque approach to architecture and planning (such as Camillo Sitte and Raymond Unwin) likewise drew attention to the medieval forms of towns and cities, but while they were seeking inspiration in them for their new urban designs, all the same, like the modernists they too depicted medieval urban development to be on the whole unplanned and organic.

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