The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement that elevated reason, empirical knowledge, natural rights and the idea of social progress over inherited authority and tradition. It found expression in works such as Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, Kant's essay urging readers to 'dare to know', and the political writing of Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau. Its proponents argued that society, government and even the physical environment could be analysed and deliberately improved. The movement was centred on Paris, Edinburgh and other salon and university cities.
By treating society as something open to rational reform, the Enlightenment made the city itself an object of improvement, seeding the public-health, civic-statistical and reformist currents that later fed modern town planning.