Ideal city

An ideal city is the concept of a plan for a city that has been conceived in accordance with a particular rational or moral objective. The "ideal" nature of such a city may encompass the moral, spiritual and juridical qualities of citizenship as well as the ways in which these are realised through urban structures including buildings, street layout, etc. The ground plans of ideal cities are often based on grids (in imitation of Roman town planning) or other geometrical patterns. The ideal city is often an attempt to deploy Utopian ideals at the local level of urban configuration and living space and amenity rather than at the culture- or civilisation-wide level of the classical Utopias such as St Thomas More's Utopia. Several attempts to develop ideal city plans are known from the Renaissance, and appear from the second half of the fifteenth century. The concept dates at least from the period of Plato, whose Republic is a philosophical exploration of the notion of the 'ideal city'. The nobility of the Renaissance, seeking to imitate the qualities of Classical civilisation, sometimes sought to construct such ideal cities either in reality or notionally through a reformation of manners and culture. The Renaissance concept of an Ideal town developed by Italian polymath Leon Battista Alberti (14041472), author of ten books of treatises on modern architecture titled De re aedificatoria written about 1450 with additions made until the time of his death in 1472, concerned the planning and building of an entire town as opposed to individual edifices for private patrons or ecclesiastical purposes. Alberti insisted on choosing the location of the town first, followed by careful setting up of the size and direction of streets, then location of bridges and gates, and finally a building pattern ruled by perfect symmetry. One of the more prominent examples of a town modelled on this theory was Zamość founded in the 16th century by the chancellor Jan Zamoyski. At present, it is a World Heritage Site in Poland.