THE ORIGINS: BAUMEISTER AND THE SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION OF ZONING Reinhard Baumeister (1833–1917) is not merely a figure of reference in the history of urban planning: he is the founder of the discipline as an autonomous technical and juridical science....
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THE ORIGINS: BAUMEISTER AND THE SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION OF ZONING Reinhard Baumeister (1833–1917) is not merely a figure of reference in the history of urban planning: he is the founder of the discipline as an autonomous technical and juridical science. Before Camillo Sitte theorised the aesthetics of urban form or Joseph Stübben codified the rules of street layout, Baumeister had already taken the decisive step: systematising the laws of industrial urban growth into a transmissible and applicable normative corpus. To him belongs the intellectual paternity of zoning in Germany, and through Germany, of the entire Western planning tradition. In 1874, at the Congress of German Architects and Engineers, Baumeister advanced a proposal destined to reshape the governance of cities for the century to follow: the systematic subdivision of urban territory into zones differentiated by function — residential versus industrial — and by building intensity, namely the height and density of buildings. T
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