Le Cor­busier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Brad­bury: they and oth­er 20th-cen­tu­ry nota­bles all gave seri­ous thought to the ide­al city, what it would include and what it would exclude. To that extent we could describe them, in 21st-cen­tu­ry par­lance, as urban­ists. But the roots of the dis­ci­pline — or area of research, or pro­fes­sion, or obses­sion — we call urban­ism run all the way back to the 15th cen­tu­ry. At that time, ear­ly in the Euro­pean Renais­sance, thinkers were recon­sid­er­ing a host of con­di­tions tak­en for grant­ed in the medieval peri­od, from man’s place in the uni­verse (and indeed the uni­verse itself) to the dis­pos­al of his garbage. Few of these fig­ures thought as far ahead, or across as many fields as Leonar­do da Vin­ci.

In addi­tion to his accom­plish­ments in art, sci­ence, engi­neer­ing, and archi­tec­ture, the quin­tes­sen­tial “Renais­sance man” also tried his hand at urban­ism. More specif­i­cal­ly, he includ­ed in his note­books designs for what he saw as an ide­al city. “Leonar­do was 30 when he moved to Milan in around 1482,” writes Engi­neer­ing and Tech­nol­o­gy’s Hilary Clarke.

“The city he found was a crowd­ed medieval war­ren of build­ings, with no san­i­ta­tion. Soon after the young painter had arrived, it was hit by an out­break of the bubon­ic plague that killed 50,000 peo­ple — more than a third of the city’s pop­u­la­tion at the time.” This could well have prompt­ed him to draw up his plan, which dates between 1487 and 1490, for a clean­er and more effi­cient urban envi­ron­ment.

While it would­n’t have been par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to envi­sion a less dirty and dis­or­dered set­ting than the late medieval Euro­pean city, Leonar­do, true to form, per­formed a thor­ough­go­ing act of reimag­i­na­tion. “Draw­ing on the knowl­edge he had gained from study­ing Milan’s canals, Leonar­do want­ed to use water to con­nect the city like a cir­cu­la­to­ry sys­tem,” writes Clarke, who adds that Leonar­do was also study­ing human anato­my at the time. “His ide­al town-plan­ning prin­ci­ple was to have a mul­ti-tiered city, which also includ­ed an under­ground water­way to flush away efflu­ent.” The top tier would have all the hous­es, squares and oth­er pub­lic build­ings; “the bot­tom tier was for the poor, goods and traf­fic — hors­es and carts — and ran on the same lev­el as the canals and basins, so wag­ons could be eas­i­ly offloaded.”

Though its ambi­tion would have seemed fan­tas­ti­cal in the 15th cen­tu­ry, Leonar­do’s city plan every­where mar­shals his con­sid­er­able engi­neer­ing knowl­edge to address prac­ti­cal prob­lems. He had a real loca­tion in mind — along the Tici­no Riv­er, which runs through mod­ern-day Italy and Switzer­land — and planned details right down to the spi­ral stair­cas­es in every build­ing. He insist­ed on spi­rals, Clarke notes, “because they lacked cor­ners, mak­ing it hard­er for men to uri­nate,” but they also add an ele­gance to his vision of the ver­ti­cal city, a notion that strikes us as obvi­ous today but was unknown then. Of course, Leonar­do was a man ahead of his time, and the 3D-ren­dered and phys­i­cal mod­els of his ide­al city in these videos from the Ide­al Spaces Work­ing Group and Italy’s Museo Nazionale del­la Scien­za e del­la Tec­nolo­gia Leonar­do da Vin­ci make one won­der if his plan would­n’t look both allur­ing and impos­si­bly rad­i­cal to urban­ists even today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Drew an Accu­rate Satel­lite Map of an Ital­ian City (1502)

The Medieval City Plan Gen­er­a­tor: A Fun Way to Cre­ate Your Own Imag­i­nary Medieval Cities

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

Denmark’s Utopi­an Gar­den City Built Entire­ly in Cir­cles: See Astound­ing Aer­i­al Views of Brønd­by Have­by

The Utopi­an, Social­ist Designs of Sovi­et Cities

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

With The Hunch­back of Notre-Dame, Vic­tor Hugo intend­ed less to tell a sto­ry than to mount a defense of Goth­ic archi­tec­ture, which in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry was being demol­ished in cities all across France. The book’s orig­i­nal pur­pose is more clear­ly reflect­ed by its orig­i­nal title, Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482, and the tit­u­lar medieval cathe­dral’s impor­tance to the cap­i­tal for near­ly two cen­turies now owes a great deal to the nov­el­ist’s advo­ca­cy. Hugo would no doubt be pleased by the effort that has gone into pre­serv­ing Notre-Dame into the 21st cen­tu­ry, share in the feel­ings of dev­as­ta­tion that fol­lowed the fire of April 2019, and admire the spir­it that moti­vat­ed com­mence­ment of the restora­tion work imme­di­ate­ly there­after.

Or rather, the com­mence­ment of the sta­bi­liza­tion work imme­di­ate­ly there­after: giv­en the extent of the dam­age, the then-674-year-old struc­ture had first to be made safe to restore. The AFP News Agency video above explains and visu­al­izes that process, a com­plex and dif­fi­cult one in itself. The first pri­or­i­ty was to pro­tect the exposed areas of the cathe­dral from the ele­ments and shore up their fly­ing but­tress­es (a sig­na­ture struc­tur­al ele­ment of Goth­ic archi­tec­ture) to pre­vent col­lapse.

Melt­ed togeth­er by the fire, sec­tions of scaf­fold­ing that had been set up for pre­vi­ous restora­tion work also posed con­sid­er­able dif­fi­cul­ties to remove with­out harm­ing the build­ing. As for the rub­ble heaped inside, sort­ing through it required con­duct­ing a 3D scan, then bring­ing in remote-con­trolled robots and a team of archae­ol­o­gists.

“I saw the dis­as­ter unfold­ing before me,” says one such archae­ol­o­gist, Olivi­er Puaux, in the Radio France Inter­na­tionale video just above. “It was so sad that I went home before the spire fell.” But just a month lat­er he returned to work on the ambi­tious restora­tion project, sev­er­al of whose work­ers appear to share their expe­ri­ence with its chal­lenges, dan­gers, and per­haps unex­pect­ed learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. Remov­ing and sort­ing through all the fall­en wood, stone, and oth­er mate­ri­als — some of which came through the blaze in re-usable con­di­tion — has pro­vid­ed new insights into the cathe­dral’s con­struc­tion. Even its very nails, says Puaux, turn out on close inspec­tion to be “very large, very well forged.” As dis­tressed as Vic­tor Hugo may have felt about Notre-Dame’s future, its orig­i­nal builders were sure­ly con­fi­dent that they were cre­at­ing a sur­vivor.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Dig­i­tal Scans of Notre Dame Can Help Archi­tects Rebuild the Burned Cathe­dral

A Vir­tu­al Time-Lapse Recre­ation of the Build­ing of Notre Dame (1160)

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

Notre Dame Cap­tured in an Ear­ly Pho­to­graph, 1838

Take an Aer­i­al Tour of Medieval Paris

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Anti-Chi­nese racism runs deep in Amer­i­can cul­ture and law, begin­ning in the 19th cen­tu­ry as com­pe­ti­tion inten­si­fied in Cal­i­for­nia gold and land rush­es. Chi­nese immi­grants were pushed into teem­ing cities, then den­i­grat­ed for sur­viv­ing in over­crowd­ed slums. To get a sense of the scope of the prej­u­dice, we need only con­sid­er the 1882 law known as the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act — the only leg­is­la­tion passed to explic­it­ly restrict immi­gra­tion by one eth­nic or nation­al group. The law actu­al­ly goes back to 1875, when the Page Act banned Chi­nese women from immi­grat­ing. It was only repealed in 1943.

Although rou­tine­ly evad­ed, the severe restric­tions and out­right bans on Chi­nese immi­gra­tion under the Exclu­sion Act drove and were dri­ven by racist ideas still vis­i­ble today in tropes of dan­ger­ous, exoti­cized “drag­on ladies” or sex­u­al­ly sub­mis­sive con­cu­bines: roles giv­en in ear­ly Hol­ly­wood films to the first Chi­nese-Amer­i­can movie star, Anna May Wong, who, after 1909 — despite being the most rec­og­niz­able Chi­nese-Amer­i­can in the world — had to car­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion at all times to prove her legal sta­tus.

Wong was born in Los Ange­les, a city that — like every oth­er major metrop­o­lis — became home to its own Chi­na­town, and a famous one at that. But the most famous of the seg­re­gat­ed urban areas orig­i­nat­ed in San Fran­cis­co, after the 1906 earth­quake that near­ly lev­eled the city and “came on the heels of decades of vio­lence and racist laws tar­get­ing Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties in the US,” notes Vox. “The earth­quake dev­as­tat­ed Chi­na­town. But in the destruc­tion, San Francisco’s Chi­nese busi­ness­men had an idea for a fresh start” that would define the look of Chi­na­towns world­wide.

The new Chi­na­town was more than a new start; it was sur­vival. As often hap­pens after dis­as­ters, pro­pos­als for relo­cat­ing the unpop­u­lar immi­grant neigh­bor­hood appeared “before the dust had set­tled and smoke cleared,” notes 99 Per­cent Invis­i­ble. “The city’s may­or com­mis­sioned archi­tect and urban design­er Daniel Burn­ham to draw up plans aligned with the City Beau­ti­ful move­ment.” Feel­ing they had to cater to white Amer­i­can stereo­types to gain accep­tance, Chi­nese-Amer­i­can busi­ness lead­ers “hired archi­tect T. Pater­son Ross and engi­neer A.W. Bur­gren to rebuild—even though nei­ther man had been to Chi­na.”

The archi­tects “relied on cen­turies-old images, pri­mar­i­ly of reli­gious ver­nac­u­lar, to devel­op the look of the new Chi­na­town,” and the result was to cre­ate a gen­uine tourist attrac­tion — an “icon­ic look,” the Vox Miss­ing Chap­ter video explains, that bears lit­tle resem­blance to actu­al Chi­nese cities. The Chi­nese immi­grant com­mu­ni­ty in San Fran­cis­co “kept their cul­ture alive by invent­ing a new one,” a delib­er­ate co-opta­tion of Ori­en­tal­ist stereo­types for a city, its mer­chants decid­ed, that would be built of “ver­i­ta­ble fairy palaces.”

The New Chi­na­town was “not quite Chi­nese, not quite Amer­i­can”; safe for mid­dle-class tourism and con­sump­tion and safer for Chi­nese busi­ness­es to flour­ish. The mod­el spread rapid­ly. Now, in what­ev­er major city we might might vis­it — out­side of Chi­na, that is — the Chi­na­town we encounter is both a unique cul­tur­al hybrid and a mar­ket­ing tri­umph that offered a mea­sure of pro­tec­tion to belea­guered Chi­nese immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties around the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Learn the Untold His­to­ry of the Chi­nese Com­mu­ni­ty in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta

The Utopi­an, Social­ist Designs of Sovi­et Cities

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course Mov­ing from Ancient Greece to Roco­co

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness