Town foundations in East Central Europe and the new world: The use of the grid plan in a comparative perspective

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    Abstract (may include machine translation)

    Town foundation has been the motor of urban growth over the last few millennia. This complex process, requiring terms set by a founder, a population or a community who cooperates or obeys them, and not least, a territory where it can be implemented, lends itself to comparative investigations readily. Nevertheless, most historical research on town foundation has been carried out on the level of individual settlements, political entities or founding personalities.2 This article sets out to explore the possibilities of studying this phenomenon over a broad time span, in geographically distant regions. It will compare patterns of organizing space in newly founded settlements, having towns of East Central Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on one end of the scale and Spanish towns in the Americas of the sixteenth century on the other. Since this short piece does not allow all aspects of this broad topic to be considered, I shall focus on one particular feature that connects many of the new foundations: the introduction and adaptive use of the centralized gridiron plan (in short: the grid plan), a common spatial arrangement found in various contexts over time and space. The main questions are the following: In what historical situations was the grid plan used in urban planning? What purposes did it serve and what kind of agency did it have? What place does it have in the urban development of East Central Europe? And finally, what is to be gained from using comparisons in this context?.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationMedieval East Central Europe in a Comparative Perspective
    Subtitle of host publicationFrom Frontier Zones to Lands in Focus
    EditorsGerhard Jaritz, Katalin Szende
    PublisherTaylor and Francis
    Pages157-184
    Number of pages28
    ISBN (Electronic)9781317212256
    ISBN (Print)9781138923461
    StatePublished - 2016

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