ABSTRACT
The city of Lyons, from the mid-sixteenth century, implemented strong control of building authorizations (alignements) in order to impose respect for detailed bye-laws, to widen streets and embellish the city. Compared to other French and European cities, its government was certainly remarkable in that regard. This way of dealing with cityscape and morphology was a step towards the development of a more abstract urbanism in the late eighteenth century. But it was also a sophisticated policy based on stylistic considerations that were proper to the seventeenth century, and can be described and fully understood as Baroque.
