City Planning According to Artistic Principles (Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, 1889) by the Viennese architect Camillo Sitte criticised the monotonous, geometric grids and isolated monuments produced by nineteenth-century engineering-led planning. Through close study of medieval and Renaissance towns, especially their squares and plazas, Sitte drew out principles of spatial enclosure, irregular and picturesque arrangement, and the careful framing of public space. He argued that well-shaped, enclosed squares created a sense of place that gridiron schemes destroyed. The book analysed historic European examples to derive design rules.
It provided an influential artistic counterweight to purely technical, traffic-driven planning and shaped the picturesque townscape tradition. Its ideas fed into the garden city movement, German Städtebau and twentieth-century concern for the design of public space.