Introduction

The attractive, spreading sheets of drawings that have given us planned cities during the last 200 years-such a familiar part of newspaper accounts of global adornment and of national histories-should be regarded with care. Any whole city is a huge economic and social endeavor, and a capital city is heavy with complex political loadings. These drawings inevitably appear lucid, fixed, healthful, even beautifuleverything that the social phenomenon they actually depict is not.