Cities & the Sea : Port City Planning in Early Modern Europe / / Josef W. Konvitz.

• Author: Konvitz, Josef W.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (1 online resource (xv, 235 pages :); illustrations)
• Notes: Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.; The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No derivatives 4.0 International License; Originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1978

Originally published in 1978. Josef Konvitz provides a broad comparative study of European port cities since the Renaissance by examining how they were built and rebuilt in the context of urban industrialization. Konvitz argues that as seafaring became more critical to Western civilization, intellectuals and rulers placed more importance on urban planning. Planning looked different, of course, in various European cities. In Paris, riverside planning was patched into the existing frame of the city, whereas Scandinavian towns on the Baltic were over-designed to accommodate a degree of maritime trade unsustainable for cities writ large. In the eighteenth century, city planning fell out of vogue, and new solutions were introduced to help solve the problems created by urban development. With a series of helpful maps, Konvitz's book is an important source for urban historians of early modern Europe.

Table of Contents

The Origins and Practice of Port City Planning -- The 16th Century Background -- Seaworthy Cities: Planning in the Expanding European World of the 17th Century -- The New Port Cities of France, 1660-1720 -- The Search for New Port Cities in France -- The Government Proceeds to Plan -- Civic Order and Patterns of Growth in the New Cities -- The Decline of Port City Planning -- Port City Planning after the 17th Century.