In Camillo Sitte’s classic work City Planning
According to Artistic Principles (1965, first published
in Vienna in 1889) and much later in Edmund Bacon’s
The Design of Cities (1974), good urban design was
to be based on artistic principles of good form.
Responding to the 19th-century’s new city building,
which tried to maximize the salability of properties
through abstractly rationalized land subdivision,
Camillo Sitte (1965) provided one of the first booklength
treatments of urban physical planning in
market society. Anticipating the ideas of the next
generation of planning theorists, he advocated planning
because the making of public spaces had
become an impersonal, mechanistic project, one
that was overtaking the formerly “organic”