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About the Ideal Layout of the City Street in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries

2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 42; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0096144214566983

1552-6771

Wim Boerefijn,

Architecture and Art History Studies

In the historiography of town planning, one still finds the old idea that the straight street is typical for the Renaissance, whereas medieval streets would typically be curved or crooked and irregular. In this article, this idea will be contested with the evidence of the scarce written sources concerning the subject of the layout of the city street from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and of the urban form of the new towns that were built in that period. It will also be shown that traditional interpretations of the famous passage from Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, which describes the advantages of winding streets as compared to straight streets, are largely wrong. Moreover, it will be argued that the general idea of medieval town building as something completely different than Renaissance town building is not correct.