Urban Planning, Public Health and Urban Climatology Through History

Abstract

It is a well-established fact in the profession of climatologists that anthropological procedures in an urban landscape create a region-specific climate. This was followed by the realization that urban planning is an important variable as well. While this is already known, today this issue is often not addressed in practice and does not affect the very process of urban planning, urban design or other disciplines dealing with spatial planning. The article includes an overview of the history of urban planning to try to determine when and in what context of urban climatology and public health have interventions in space been planned in the past. The scope of research includes a review of literary material with addressing some exceptional cases of spatial planning in practice that were characteristic of individual periods in architecture and urbanism. The aim of the study is also to investigate the reasons why the urban planners of the past have used climate studies the process of spatial design. Are there special reasons that led to the emergence of some plans, that we perceive differently or incompletely today, without understanding the important social background? The central part of the paper presents some key conclusions that deal with individual climatological starting points, which are common to the relevant urban theorists and reference projects cited.