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Sofia Greaves & Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (eds.), Rome and the Colonial City. Rethinking the Grid.
New towns of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and the grid plan2022 •
Wim Boerefijn, New towns of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and the grid plan. The collapse of the western Roman empire led to a long period of urban decline in western Europe. From about the 10th century onwards, however, urban life revived. Initially, this happened particularly in existing settlements – often in remnants of Roman cities, towns and fortresses – that grew and were gradually promoted to towns and cities. But towns were also created anew, almost from scratch, in short periods of time. This became more and more usual as more and more landlords sought to profit from the urban boom. Unfortunately, little is known of how this was done. In the following chapter, various aspects of these new urban creations will be outlined in the perspective of the heritage of the ancient colonial city, beginning with a short introduction of the phenomenon and subsequently focusing on spatial planning and the grid plan in particular.
In 1144 Alphonse-Jourdain Count of Toulouse founded the new town of Montauban on the Garonne River to compete with St. Théodard, a town on the opposite bank controlled by an abbey of the same name. It seems that the abbot was disliked by his vassals, or perhaps the publicity for the new town was extremely attractive, because many of the residents of St. Théodard moved quickly to take up residence in Montauban. This event was notable for several reasons. It triggered commercial development along the Garonne, consular governance of towns, and it was marked by a charter emphasizing commerce and which also determined form. Town lot sizes were set at 6 stadia wide by 12 deep and the central location and square shape of the market place and its surrounding grid became a model for many of the later bastide towns. At Montauban the extent of the formal determination was limited to lot dimensions, but later town charters address other formal aspects and suggest that concerns related to health and safety, social equality, and vehicular and pedestrian access were important in towns established or chartered by the lords of thirteenth century Languedoc. After the troubles of the Albigensian Crusade, and beginning with the foundation of the castrum of Cordes in 1222, Count Raymond VII and his lieutenant Sicard Alaman founded and re-chartered many towns in this region. This paper proposes that medieval charters and town forms were related to experiments in revenue generation conceived by these secular lords, that both they and their vassals were concerned with social and practical zoning. Examples will include Montauban and other towns the author considers the “proto-bastides” of Raymond VII: Cordes, Castelnau-de-Levis, Lisle-sur-Tarn, and Buzet.
Journal of Urban History
Origins of the French Bastides2016 •
The bastides of Languedoc form a significant sector of medieval urban history, yet their descriptions are often clouded by conflicting opinions and anachronistic views. This article aims to clarify some of the confusion about the word " bastide " through an etymological study and examination of charters in which the word was first used to designate new towns. The economic and political contexts preceding the bastide foundations are equally important. The bastides did not appear in southwestern France as an ex novo phenomenon ; rather, they followed on the heels of experiments in residential development and in a monetary economy that had been ongoing for two centuries by the counts of Toulouse.
Journal of Urban History 42 (5)
ABOUT THE IDEAL LAYOUT OF THE CITY-STREET IN THE 12 th TO 16 th CENTURIES: THE MYTH OF THE RENAISSANCE IN TOWN BUILDING2015 •
In the historiography of town planning, one still finds the old idea that the straight street is typical for the Renaissance, whereas medieval streets would typically be curved or crooked and irregular. In this article, this idea will be contested with the evidence of the scarce written sources concerning the subject of the layout of the city street from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and of the urban form of the new towns that were built in that period. It will also be shown that traditional interpretations of the famous passage from Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, which describes the advantages of winding streets as compared to straight streets, are largely wrong. Moreover, it will be argued that the general idea of medieval town building as something completely different than Renaissance town building is not correct.
Medieval Urban Planning: The Monastery and Beyond
Founders' Concepts of Space in the First Bastides (Chapter 5 in Medieval Urban Planning: The Monastery and Beyond, Ed. Mickey Abel2017 •
Chapter 5 is concerned with concepts of public and private space in towns founded or re-chartered in the territory of the counts of Toulouse between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a time of sea-change in the relationships between lords and commoners in Languedoc. Whereas up until the mid-twelfth century many rural settlements were centered around a church, monastery, or castle, a wave of new town foundations for commercial gain initiated by Count Alphonse-Jourdain of Toulouse and others along the Garonne River corridor established important precedents for the explosion of town growth after the Albigensian Crusade. Many past studies of these towns have been form-based, focusing on street layout and location of market places. This essay will use the documentary evidence of charters to illustrate the importance of commercial activity and the concerns about spatial allocations in these towns. One example from outside the area will serve as a comparison in order to shed light on the particular character of the lords governing this land and the resulting administrative bodies directing affairs in the towns. Finally, the reader is advised that the term “bastide” in the title is a bit disingenuous, as none of the towns discussed are called bastides per se in their charters. Yet, it is from two of these founder’s charters that we know he considered his new towns and those of his lord, Raymond VII of Toulouse, to be bastides—the first known instance of the term to designate a newly-founded town.
QUART. Quarterly of Art History Institute at the University of Wrocław
Migration and way of living. Houses, public spaces and city-planning in the late Middle Ages in the east-Mediterranean area2019 •
During the late Middle Ages, between the 12th and 14th centuries, most of the centers now known as historic cities were rebuilt according to new principles [...] Moving populations, a few kilometers or hundreds of kilometers away, is a typical practice of this historical phase, functional to the design of the new territorial structures. An interesting indicator is the different degree of incentive offered to migrant families. In some cities, the assignments of building plots are very expensive, therefore obtainable only after a resolution from the highest political body; in other cases, the assignments of new parcels of land on which to build a house are decidedly cheap, within the grasp of a small family of farmers or artisans. In other cases, the “annual tax” is a symbolic one. Building cities and colonies, encouraging the migration of their citizens or farmers and sometimes forcing entire social groups or villages to change residence, is one of the great programmatic activities on which the construction of a very high number of new towns is based. The transport to distant territories of their own housing traditions, urban planning models and social organisation guarantees the success, at least in the start-up phase, of the new plantations. ___(This paper is part of my communication Migration and way of living. Kinds of cities in South Italy during the Middle Age, between north Africa, Spain and Italy held in the scientific conference “Migracje w miastach Królestwa Polskiego, Pomorza i Śląska w epoce przedprzemysłowej na tle porównawczym” (Wrocław, 2–3 VI 2017)___
Thèse de doctorat soutenue en janvier 2016 à l'UTJJ. Premier volume de 6.
Journal of Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism
Vernacular Patterns in Portugal and Brazil: Evolution and AdaptationsTraditional towns in Portugal and Brazil have evolved a finely tuned coordination between, on the one hand, modular dimensions for street widths and lot sizes, and on the other, a typology of room shapes and layouts within houses. Despite being well documented in urban history, this coordination was in the last century often interpreted as contingent, a result of the limited material means of pre-industrial societies. But the continued application and gradual adaptation of these urban and architectural patterns through periods of industrialization and economic development suggests that they respond both to enduring housing requirements and to piecemeal urban growth. This article surveys the persistence of urban and architectural patterns up to the early 20th century, showing their resilience in addressing modern housing and urbanization requirements.
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Critical Studies in Education
The business of policy: a review of the corporate sector’s emerging strategies in the promotion of education reform2019 •
Science Education International
An assessment of Availability and Utilization of Laboratory facilities for Teaching Science at Secondary Level2019 •
Procedia Engineering
The Use of Fused Deposition Modelled Tooling in Low Volume Production of Stretch Formed Double Curvature Components2017 •
2016 •
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
[HECAT] D1.3 Report ethical, social, theological, technical review of 1st generation PES algorithms and data use2020 •
Semina: Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde
Araneofauna capturada no interior da mata e área de pastagem adjacente, no norte do Paraná, Brasil2006 •
Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology
L-6 Neurophysiology of preconscious and conscious mechanisms of the human brain1995 •