Medieval cities were absolutely planned.(http://users.trytel.com/tristan/towns/townint5.htm)l They did not spring up out of the ground fully formed; they were redesigned again and again for better sanitation, straighter roads, and bigger churches. And if they read as inherently more organic than modern cities, it is simply because they followed slower patterns of development and were restricted in size and scale by the limits of technology and materials. I say this because I’m wary of the idea of an all purpose future city kit/recipe that is more organic than our current or previous models. Cities have always been engines of human consumption — the city survives if the design enables citizens to meet their basic amenities, and if population and use pressures don’t damage the surrounding environment to the point where water and soil are contaminated beyond remediation. Switching from grid based to fractal cities doesn’t address our underlying problems of ecological degradation. A more organic city really is a technical issue, not an aesthetic one.
