ABSTRACT
Cities are a palimpsest of tangible forms and intangible practices that can be built upon, and that can serve to develop new practices. Political leaders, historians, theoreticians, and practitioners explored, reused, and reinterpreted earlier urban forms even before the advent of the discipline of planning in the mid-19th century, creating design traditions and enacting a sort of planning history before the term. Ever since, the same groups of people, plus professional planners, have gone on to reference historical urban form explicitly to change ongoing practice or at least to inspire current discussion, occasionally picking up geographically and temporally distant examples. How planning professionals interpreted or understood past cities, and their inclusion or exclusion of specific references, usually derived more from their intellectual context and their political or social interests than from a scholarly concern for analyzing historical cities in their own terms.
