Urbanism is the practice of designing the physical makeup of cities—what gets built and where, how people and goods move around, and who is served by planning, engineering, and development.
The word urbanism comes from the Latin urbanus and the French urbanisme. Its roots reach down at least to 2000 or 3000 BCE Mesopotamia, where specialists designed canals, regulated streets, and standardized buildings. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BCE) specified liabilities and penalties for construction defects.
Urbanism was widespread in Ancient Greece and Rome, There was cadastral surveying, orthogonal town plans, land centuriation, and aqueducts. Hippodamus (born c. 498 BCE) studied the functional problems of cities and linked urban form to civic administration.
Intentional urbanism practices shaped the early United States. By the 1700s, colonial towns across the country featured surveyable grids, market-led platting, pragmatic sites for trade, layered civic spaces, public-health infrastructure, and landscape aesthetics.
Public transit entered the picture in the early 1800s. In 1827, the first intercity passenger rail service, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), began. In 1832, horse-drawn streetcars began operating in New York City and quickly spread around the country. Municipal electrification came in the 1880s and electric streetcars replaced the horsecars, eventually serving 800–1,000 U.S. towns.
In the late 1800s the first widely used personal transportation vehicle, and still the most efficient, was born: The bicycle. Starting in the 1860s, inventors experimented with designs like high‑wheel “penny‑farthings.” By the 1880s, better components, especially the chain drive and air‑filled rubber tires, made bicycles comfortable and practical.
Bicycling for transportation began to take off, but it hit a stumbling block: A lack of good roads to ride on. So, one of the bicycle’s first lessons, and an enduring one, is that a vehicle is nothing without infrastructure. Years before automobiles became popular, the League of American Wheelmen (now the League of American Bicyclists) advocated to build smooth, all‑weather bicycle roads and launched Good Roads magazine in 1892 to support that effort. The League helped win legal recognition of bicycles as vehicles with equal road rights and promoted engineering standards for roadways.
Cities change people. The conditions of cities—that they are relatively large, dense, and socially heterogeneous—tend to restructure social relations from intimate, primary-group ties to impersonal, segmental, and transitory contacts. That yields both greater individual freedom and innovation as well as heightened social disorganization, anomie, and reliance on formal controls. This is the subject of Louis Wirth’s 1938 essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life.”
Cities also are people. And cities therefore thrive when they support dense, fine-grained, mixed-use neighborhoods that enable constant, casual human contact and self-organization—a contrast to top-down “urban renewal” and single-use planning. That is what Jane Jacobs shows in her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”
In the 1980s, architect Ron Mace popularized “universal design,” the idea that built environments should proactively work for people of all abilities, not being treated as an extra burden for the benefit of a few, but rather as a design principle that benefits everyone.
Universal design addresses car‑centric planning, which excludes many people who cannot easily drive and undermines the economics of transit, walking, and cycling—results of decades of policies that prioritized rights, privileges, and funding for automobiles. It emphasizes multiple transportation modes, accessible public transit, and walkable, accessible communities.
The concept of “new urbanism” emerged in the 1990s with a coalition of professionals (Congress for the New Urbanism) seeking to restore existing urban centers and towns to more traditional compact forms and reconfigure sprawling suburbs into real neighborhoods and diverse districts. Core new urbanism principles include:
- Mix uses at a walkable scale and connect fine‑grained street networks.
- Design for people first: active ground floors, short blocks, human‑scaled buildings, and complete streets.
- Align urban design with transit and environmental goals.
- Use codes and standards that regulate form and context rather than single‑use zoning.
Between around 2000 to today there has been a burst of organizations and individuals that have made many contributions to urbanism, especially on the topics of and connections between housing, transportation, land use, community development, climate, electrification, and equity.
Looking ahead, urbanism matters in part because cities possess a great power to concentrate people and resources, which in turn can create scale, efficiency, productivity, cooperation, and innovation in support of higher well‑being. Urbanism wields that power.
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