Towns in the making / by Gerald Burke

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Introduction: relevance of study of towns in perspective -- 2. Prehistory: bronze-age and iron-age settlement -- 3. Classical: greek and roman towns and countryside -- 4. Medieval: organic and planned towns; feudal and manorial development in town and countryside -- 5. Renaissance: in western Europe; mercantilism, colonisation, expansion, fortification; international trade and transport routes; influence of Renaissance architects, philosophers and military engineers on town design; ideal cities and town improvement -- 6. Renaissance Britain: rise of towns. Inigo Jones and Wren; town planning and estate development in Georgian and Recency eras. Eighteenth-century countryside: agrarian revolution and parks and garden planning; inventions and industrial development; national transport routes -- 7. Industrial Britain: industrial revolution, transport revolution, rises in population; effects on urban growth and formation of slums; reformers and Utopianss; model communities; industrial villages, garden cities; town improvement in later nineteenth-century countryside -- 8. Twentieth-century Britain: evolution of modern town planning control and legislation; effects of two world wars; New Towns, expanded towns; town improvement -- 9. Conclusions: observations and afterthoughts -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book is not for specialists but for students, and not for students of history but of town-planning and town-building. It attempts a review of town formation from earliest settlements until the present, high-lighting physical achievements rather than the political, economic or social circumstances in which they were realised. Study of so broad a subject as town-making, embodying, as it does, aspects of so many related disciplines as architecture, estate management, municipal engineering, sociology, geography and law, leaves a little opportunity for close study of historical aspects. The present study, set in a world-wide background and following a tenuous thread of developments over some sixty centuries, cannot begin to be comprehensive. It examines phases and achievements of town-building in history which have relevance, and offer inspiration, precept or warning, for towns of today and to tomorrow. It skims over remote river-valley civilizations of 5000 B.C., glances at classical Greece and Rome, stays a while in the medieval environment (since much of medieval origin is still with us) and a little longer in stimulating Renaissance of urban western Europe. Thence the breath of prospect narrows and the depth of investigation increases for Britain of the eighteeth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.