Cities & the Sea

Download or read book Cities & the Sea written by Josef W. Konvitz and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1978. Josef Konvitz provides a broad comparative study of European port cities since the Renaissance by examining how they were built and rebuilt in the context of urban industrialization. Konvitz argues that as seafaring became more critical to Western civilization, intellectuals and rulers placed more importance on urban planning. Planning looked different, of course, in various European cities. In Paris, riverside planning was patched into the existing frame of the city, whereas Scandinavian towns on the Baltic were over-designed to accommodate a degree of maritime trade unsustainable for cities writ large. In the eighteenth century, city planning fell out of vogue, and new solutions were introduced to help solve the problems created by urban development. With a series of helpful maps, Konvitz's book is an important source for urban historians of early modern Europe.