or both of these conditions have been absent.  In Asia during much of its history, in early Greece, in Europe during the first half of the Middle Ages, towns have consisted of one or two dominant buildings, temple or church or castle, of one or two processional avenues for worshippers at sacred festivals, and a little adjacent chaos of tortuous lanes and squalid houses.  Architects have devised beautiful buildings in such towns.  But they have not touched the chaos or treated the whole inhabited area as one unit.  Town-planning has been here unknown.[2]

[2] Compare Brinckmann’s remarks on mediaeval towns:  ’Der Nachdruck liegt auf den einzelnen Gebaeuden, der Kathedrale, dem Palazzo publico, den festen Palaesten des Adels, nicht auf ibrer einheitlichen Verbindung.  Ebenso erscheint die ganze Stadt nur eine Ansammlung einzelner Bauten.  Strassen und Plaetze sind unbebaute Reste.’

In other periods towns have been founded in large numbers and full-grown or nearly full-grown, to furnish homes for multitudes of common men, and their founders have built them on some plan or system.  One such period is, of course, our own.  Within the last half-century towns have arisen all over Europe and America.  They are many in number.  They are large in area.  Most of them have been born almost full-grown; some have been established complete; others have developed abruptly out of small villages; elsewhere, additions huge enough to form separate cities have sprung up beside towns already great.  Throughout this development we can trace a tendency to plan, beginning with the unconscious mechanical arrangements of industrial cities or suburbs and ending in the conscious efforts of to-day.

If we consider their size and their number together, these new European and American towns surpass anything that the world has yet seen.  But, save in respect of size, the process of founding or enlarging towns is no new thing.  In the old world, alike in the Greek lands round the eastern Mediterranean and in the wide empire of Rome, urban life increased rapidly at certain periods through the establishment of towns almost full-grown.  The earliest towns of Greece and Italy were, through sheer necessity, small.  They could not grow beyond the steep hill-tops which kept them safe, or house more inhabitants than their scanty fields could feed.[3] But the world was then large; new lands lay open to those who had no room at home, and bodies of willing exiles, keeping still their custom of civil life, planted new towns throughout the Mediterranean lands.  The process was extended by state aid.  Republics or monarchs founded colonies to extend their power or to house their veterans, and the results were equally towns springing up full-grown in southern Europe and, western Asia and even northern Africa.  So too in remoter regions.  Obscure evidence from China suggests that there also in early times towns were planted and military colonies were sent to outlying regions on somewhat the same methods as were used by the Greeks and Romans.