The Town-Plan as Built Heritage

Abstract

The physical form of cities is exposed to conflicting forces of change and conservation. In the conservation field, despite the advances achieved over the last decades changing the paradigm from historical monuments to urban landscapes, the focus tends to be on the building fabric and the main three-dimensional characteristics of buildings. This paper proposes a complementary emphasis for conservation—the town-plan, meaning the different patterns of combination of streets, plots, and block-plans of buildings (building footprints). Preserving the town-plan of urban areas built in the past, means bringing to the present significant parts of urban history, assuring diversity (a key characteristic for sustainable, resilient, and safe cities), and providing a basis for the design of new areas more accessible, dense, and continuous. This argument is illustrated in the Chelsea district in New York at two different scales.

Keywords

• conservation
• heritage
• urban morphology
• urban form
• town-plan
• streets