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European city planning and design have a long history. Most Greek and Roman settlements were deliberately laid out on the grid system, within which the siting of key buildings was carefully thought out. The roots of modern Western urban planning and design can be traced to the Renaissance and Baroque periods (between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries) in Europe, when artists and intellectuals dreamed of ideal cities, and rich and powerful regimes used urban design to produce extravagant symbolizations of wealth, power, and destiny. Inspired by the classical art forms of ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance urban design sought to recast cities in a deliberate attempt to show off the power and the glory of the state and church. Spreading slowly from its origins in Italy at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Renaissance design successfully diffused to most of the larger cities of Europe. Dramatic advances in weaponry brought a surge of planned redevelopment that featured impressive geometric-shaped fortifications and an extensive sloping, clear zone of fire. Inside new walls, cities were recast according to a new aesthetic of grand design – fancy palaces, geometrical plans, streetscapes, and gardens that emphasized views of dramatic perspectives. These developments were often so extensive and so interconnected with each other that they effectively fixed the layout of cities well into the eighteenth, and even into the nineteenth, century, when walls and/or open spaces eventually made way for urban redevelopment in the form of parks, railway lines, or beltways. As societies and economies became more complex with the transition to industrial capitalism, national rulers and city leaders looked to urban design to impose order, safety, and efficiency, as well as to symbolize the new seats of power and authority. The most important early precedent was set in Paris by Napoleon III, who presided over a comprehensive program of urban redevelopment and monumental urban design. The work was carried out by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. Haussmann demolished large sections of old Paris to make way for broad, new, tree-lined avenues, with numerous public open spaces and monuments. In doing so, he made the city not only more efficient (wide boulevards meant better flows of traffic) and a better place to live (parks and gardens allowed more fresh air and sunlight in a crowded city and were held to be a civilizing influence) but also safer from revolutionary politics (wide boulevards were hard to barricade; monuments and statues helped to instill a sense of pride and identity). The preferred architectural style for these new designs was the Beaux Arts style. In this school, architects were trained to draw on Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque styles, synthesizing them in designs for new buildings for the Industrial Age. The idea was that the new buildings would blend artfully with the older palaces, cathedrals, and civic buildings that dominated European city centers. Haussmann's ideas were widely influential and extensively copied. Early in the twentieth century there emerged a different intellectual and artistic reaction to the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. This was the Modern movement, which was based on the idea that buildings and cities should be designed and run like machines. Equally important to the Modernists was that urban design should not simply reflect dominant social and cultural values but, rather, help to create a new moral and social order. The movement's best-known advocate was Le Corbusier, a Paris-based Swiss who provided the inspiration for technocratic urban design. Modernist buildings sought to dramatize technology, exploit industrial production techniques, and use modern materials and unembellished, functional design. Le Corbusier's ideal city featured linear clusters of high-density, medium-rise apartment blocks, elevated on stilts and segregated from industrial districts; high-rise tower office blocks; and transportation routes – all separated by broad expanses of public open space. After 1945 this concept of urban design became pervasive, part of what became known as the International Style: boxlike steel-frame buildings with concrete-and-glass facades. The International Style was avant-garde yet respectable and, above all, comparatively inexpensive to build. This tradition of urban design, more than anything else, has imposed a measure of uniformity on cities around the world.