City as Political Form: Four Archetypes of Urban Transformation

Pier Vittorio Aureli focuses on the category of archetype as an alternative to the idea of type. Four examples – the axial streets of Renaissance Rome, the 17th-century Parisian place, the 19th-century independent block in Berlin and the 20th-century Viennese superblock – are explored here to describe the emergence of modern urban forms that explicitly embody power relations.