Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities (1967) stands as a richly illustrated and intellectually robust exploration of urban design, tracing the evolution of city form from ancient civilisations to the mid-20th century. Bacon’s central premise is that the spatial structure of cities is not merely functional or aesthetic, but deeply expressive of cultural values, collective memory, and human perception. Through a comparative analysis of cities such as Rome, Paris, Philadelphia, and Chandigarh, he unpacks how urban form—when thoughtfully composed—can shape and enhance the experiential quality of daily life. Unlike purely technocratic approaches, Bacon insists that city design is a visual art guided by movement, advocating for a choreography of spatial sequences that engage the senses and the imagination. This humanistic emphasis is grounded in his belief that successful urban environments depend on continuity, scale, spatial drama, and legibility, especially as experienced by the pedestrian. The book argues that design decisions must be sensitive to the flow of movement and the spatial hierarchy people intuitively read while walking through the city. Bacon also critiques the disjointedness introduced by zoning, automobile infrastructure, and isolated modernist buildings, pointing instead to the power of integrated civic space—public plazas, axial views, and layered connectivity. By offering detailed diagrams and insights from his own work in Philadelphia, he provides not only a historical analysis but also a design methodology rooted in perception and participation. His work becomes a bridge between classical city-making principles and contemporary urban challenges. For planners and designers today, Design of Cities continues to be a foundational text in understanding how the morphology of the city influences social interaction, memory, and spatial comprehension. It underlines that truly walkable cities are not engineered by metrics alone, but composed as visual and experiential narratives that unfold in motion.
Bacon, E. (1967) Design of Cities. New York: Viking Press.
