The Grid Plan: Choice or Force? Power and Town Planning in the Middle Ages in a Comparative Perspective

Founding towns has been the motor of urban growth over the last few millennia. This complex process, presupposing terms set by a founder, a population who obeys to these, and not least, a territory where it can be carried out, readily lends itself to comparative investigations. My talk will focus on the introduction and adaptive use of the regular grid, a common method of planning, in several different contexts over time and space. The set of examples to be surveyed will range from cities in the Roman Empire through the urban boom of the thirteenth century in Western and East Central Europe to the colonial towns in the New World in the sixteenth century. Investigating whether there are comparable strategies behind the use of the grid plan, be it due to considerations of power, control, practicality, or conventions, may lead us to a better understanding of driving forces behind urban planning, and make us aware of human attitudes to structured and lived space. At the same time it raises the issue whether there was room in spaces created in this way for liberty and autonomy, notions so often associated with urban life.

Katalin Szende has been Associate Professor at the Department of Medieval Studies at the CEU from 1999. She has MA degrees in History, Archaeology and Latin philology, and a PhD in Medieval Studies from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She is board member of the International Commission for the History of Towns and associate convener of the European Atlas of Historic Towns project. She has published extensively on towns in medieval Hungary, especially their society, literacy, everyday life and topography, and she is currently preparing a monograph on urban development in the Carpathian Basin between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.

See her full CV and publications at http://ias.ceu.edu/Szende