ABSTRACT
At the end of the Second World War a desire grew up amongst European countries to work together in the spirit of reconciliation. For its part, the International Commission for the History of Towns (ICHT) agreed in Rome to the production of a European historic towns atlas. The German atlas was to be published as individual sequences consisting of town plans but also images, since elevations were considered to be just as important for town's identity as ground plans. German atlas Stoob had decided that the essay should consist of two pages in the larger format for all towns, whether it was Cologne or a small provincial place. Michael Conzen writes in his retrospective review of the atlas project of an 'unsettling heterogeneity of methodology and treatment'. In an address to the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Vienna in 1965 Aubin, then president of the ICHT set the scene within the commission for the emergence of comparative urban studies.
