Town Planning in 1909

Raymond Unwin’s 1909 Town planning in practice: an introduction to the art of designing cities and suburbs is available in Internet Archive…a snapshot of the ideas of period with illustrations of examples. The illustrations I found most interesting were town/city plans. The ones from Moscow and the excavated part of Pompeii are the two samples I picked from the book.

Of course – a lot has changed in all the places shown in the book in the years since it was published but there are anchors in the built environment that are still around….sometimes perturbing modernization efforts and making infrastructure improvement more challenging. And there are some concepts that are still very much in evidence in modern cities – like ring roads (interstates) that surround all our major cities!