An ideal city is the concept of a plan for a city that has been conceived in accordance with the dictates of some "rational" or "moral" objective.
How Pienza city centre started a urban approach used in modern cities
The "ideal" nature of such a city may encompass the moral, spiritual and juridical qualities of citizenship as well as the ways in which these are realised through urban structures including buildings, street layout, etc. The ground plans of ideal cities are often based on grids (in imitation of Roman town planning) or other geometrical patterns. The ideal city is often an attempt to deploy Utopian ideals at the local level of urban configuration and living space and amenity rather than at the culture- or civilisation-wide level of the classical Utopias such as St Thomas More's.
The ideal city attributed to Luciano Laurana or Melozzo da Forlì.
Several attempts to develop ideal city plans are known from the Renaissance, and appear from the second half of the fifteenth century. The concept dates at least from the period of Plato, whose Republic is a philosophical exploration of the notion of the 'ideal city'. The nobility of the Renaissance, seeking to imitate the qualities of Classical civilisation, sometimes sought to construct such ideal cities either in reality or notionally through a reformation of manners and culture.
That of an “ideal city” is a concept conceived during the Italian Renaissance, in accordance with the dictates of a rational objective. This concept is deeply rooted in the so-called Umanesimo [Renaissance Humanism], a system focusing on humans and their values, capacities, and worth which represented a cultural, social and artistic revolution. In this context the human being at the centre of this system, while the environment in which he lived underwent a revolution too. For the first time the idea of an ideal city came to its definitive design—casting its huge influence on contemporary urban planning.
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The ideal Renaissance town was a symmetric, harmonic settlement built around a central square, similar to that depicted in the anonymous painting The Ideal City.
Piazza Pio II An ideal model of life and government
From the main square, the entire urban tissue developed, with its regular geography aimed at making life easy and harmonious, conceived to maximise the interactions and the happiness of its inhabitants. This eventually came to embody a model of ideal living and government based on the concept of a self-sufficient, peaceful and hardworking population.
The concept of the Ideal City after Pienza
After Pienza, the very idea that a city should reflect some “golden standards”, matching perfectly its territory and time has become a founding principle in the architectural thinking. The quest for efficient, organized and well functioning cities continued through the ages with many great modern and contemporary architects all over the world and through the ages.
Examples of the ideal cities include Filarete's "Sforzinda", a description of which was included in his Trattato di Architettura (c. 1465). The city of Sforzinda was laid out within an eight-pointed star inscribed within a circular moat. Further examples may have been intended to have been read into the so-called "Urbino" and "Baltimore" panels (second half of the fifteenth century), which show Classically influenced architecture disposed in logically planned piazzas. The cities of Nicosia and Valletta, whose fortifications were built in the 1560s by the Republic of Venice and Order of St. John respectively, are considered to be practical examples of the concept of the ideal city. Other notable example of the concept is Zamość in eastern Poland founded in the late 16th century, modelled by the Italian architect Bernardo Morando.
James Oglethorpe synthesized Classical and Renaissance concepts of the ideal city with new Enlightenment ideals of scientific planning, harmony in design, and social equality in his plan for the Province of Carolina. The physical design component of the famous Oglethorpe Plan remains preserved in the Savannah Historic District.
Late nineteenth-century examples of the ideal city include the Garden city movement of Sir Ebenezer Howard, realised at Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City in England. Poundbury, Prince Charles' architectural vision established in Dorset, is among the most recent examples of ideal city planning.
Youth Committee of the Italian National Commission for UNESCO
https://hisour.com/story/pienza-first-ideal-city-becomes-real-italian-youth-committee-unesco/
