Building regulations in Livonian towns and their impact on local urban space, 1697–1904

This chapter traces the late seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century building regulations of towns in today’s Estonia and Latvia (namely Riga, Tallinn, Jelgava, Tartu, Viljandi, and Pärnu) and searches for connections between the building regulations and the genesis of town plans, aiming to discover the extent of their impact on local townscapes. It seems probable that the earlier regulations have shaped building traditions and have also notably influenced later building acts and practices.