page_title: Gothic secular and domestic architecture
section_title: New cities, town planning and urbanisation
hierarchical_section_title: Gothic secular and domestic architecture / Scope / New cities, town planning and urbanisation
caption_attribution_description: Italy 2010
context_page_description: Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture.
  Originating in 12th-century France and lasting into the 16th century, Gothic architecture is most familiar as the architecture of many of the great cathedrals, abbeys and churches of Europe. It is also the architecture of many non-religious buildings, such as castles, palaces, town halls, guild halls, universities and to a less prominent extent, private dwellings.
  Although secular and civic architecture in general was subordinate in importance to ecclesiastical architecture, civic architecture grew in importance as the Middle Ages progressed. David Watkin, for example writes about secular Gothic architecture in present-day Belgium: "However, it is the secular architecture, the guild-halls and town halls of her prosperous commercial cities, which make Belgium unique. Their splendour often exceeds that of contemporary ecclesiastical foundations, while their decorative language was not without influence on churches such as Antwerp Cathedral."
context_section_description: Several new towns and cities were established in Europe during the high and late Middle Ages. Beginning in the 12th century, urbanisation slowly again started to spread across Europe, where urban development had since the fall of the Roman Empire in general been brought to a standstill or of very limited scope. With time, as cities grew and new towns were established, this spurred a political development that slowly began to challenge the feudal system dominant at the time. The growing power of the cities was reflected in the erection of town halls, guilds, and other mercantile and civic buildings. As noted above, regional differences in the structure of political power is reflected in the architecture of medieval cities.
  While most cities during the Gothic era grew over a longer period in a more or less haphazard way, there are some examples of centralised town planning from the period. Several new towns designed with grid plans were founded in the south of France in the 13th and 14th centuries, where they are known as Bastides. These cities and towns had their own characteristics: "Purpose-built on unoccupied land, these bastides were immediately different from older medieval villages with winding streets that grew willy-nilly over decades. The bastides adopted the regular square grid of ancient Roman towns, with an arcaded market square at the center. In most cases, the church was set off to the side of the square, pointing to the priority given to trade." The city of Aigues Mortes in southern France is an unusually large example of a consciously redesigned, if not strictly new, city.
  In England, a symmetrical plan was conceived but never completely carried out for New Winchelsea, one of the so-called Cinque Ports, wine trading posts in Kent and Sussex. England is also the site of what is claimed to be the oldest purely residential street with its original buildings all surviving intact in Europe, Vicar's Close in Wells, Somerset, a planned street dating from the 1360s. In Wales, Edward I commissioned a series of castles and adjacent new towns as part of a settlement policy with the intent to pacify the recently conquered principality of Wales. Caernarfon and Conwy are two such planned towns of regular layout.
  It was not only new, founded cities that had extensive building regulations. London, Florence, Paris, Venice and numerous smaller cities in Spain and Italy had rules concerning not only the height and shape of buildings, but also for example regulating the width of streets, the projection of roofs and rules concerning waste management, drainage and fire regulations. The Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy is one of the earliest examples of "coherent town planning along aesthetic lines, perhaps for the first time since antiquity." Official regulations governing the size of the palaces facing the square date from 1298. The famous square is dominated by the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall. With growing prosperity and an emerging sense of civic pride, town halls such as Palazzo Pubblico often became a show-piece of the cities' growing confidence. In the cities of northern Italy, this development started early and many Gothic town halls and other civic monuments have to a large extent survived to this day.
  Outside of Italy, there was a strong growth of trade not least in the Low Countries, and along the Rhine and Rhône rivers. Present-day Belgium is justly famous for its well-preserved medieval cities, like Bruges and Ghent, and its rich heritage of some of the finest civic Gothic architecture, such as the stupendous town halls of Mons, Ghent, Leuven and Oudenaarde.
  Lübeck, founded in 1143, quickly established itself as the centre of the Hanseatic League, and the source of inspiration for cities established and expanded in the Baltic Sea region as trade routes in the area grew in importance. The example of Lübeck influenced and promoted similar architectural development in many of the cities in the area, albeit of course with local variations. Notable examples of such Hanseatic towns with rich medieval heritage include 
caption: Palazzo Publico and Piazza del Campo, Siena.
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